The timing may have been coincidental, but the symbolism is not. Within days of the Nobel Prize in Economics being awarded to Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt for their seminal work on innovation and growth, Google announced a $15-billion plan to build its largest artificial intelligence (AI) data centre outside the US, in Visakhapatnam. Both events underscore a single message: innovation and technological infrastructure are the twin engines of modern growth and prosperity. For India, which stands at an inflection point in its technological journey, they are reminders that the next phase of growth cannot be left to chance.
Our progress over the past few years has certainly been more than satisfactory in building the foundation of a technology and electronics ecosystem. From Apple’s rapid scaling of iPhone production to semiconductor projects worth Rs 1.5 lakh crore under execution, the pieces are slowly coming together. The government’s recent Rs 22,919-crore components manufacturing scheme completes the cycle, ensuring that the entire hardware stack, from chips and printed circuit boards to camera modules and lithium-ion cells, is increasingly made in the country. Add to this Zoho’s quiet but confident strides in developing home-grown software such as Arattai, and India seems well on its way to becoming not just a manufacturing hub but a genuine technology player.
Yet, this transformation is still mostly about making in India for the world. Global manufacturers have discovered in India a reliable production base and a large market, while domestic firms have become efficient suppliers and assemblers within global value chains. There is nothing wrong with that. But the next stage of evolution demands something more ambitious than making in India, for the world, with ideas born here. Surely, Google’s Visakhapatnam hub, to be built with the Adani Group and Airtel, will give India a massive physical backbone for AI, improving data sovereignty and enabling faster, cheaper computing power. So will the government’s AI Mission to develop indigenous large language models. But it is also true that much of the computing hardware, especially the graphics processing units (GPUs) powering these AI data centres, still comes from Nvidia. As of today, we are hosting the world’s AI, not fully creating it. The goal must therefore shift from assembling AI infrastructure to designing it, from coding global software to inventing our own platforms. Indeed, the government has talked of plans to develop indigenous GPUs within three to four years and build sovereign computing capacity. It reflects an understanding that true technological independence will not come from importing intelligence but from engineering it.
The work of the Nobel laureates reminds us that sustained economic growth is not automatic but comes only where innovation is continuously renewed and supported. Infrastructure alone does not create prosperity, ideas do. The policy challenge, then, is to ensure that the massive investments now underway in hardware, semiconductors, and AI are matched by equal ambition in research, software design, intellectual property creation, and skilling our large population base. What’s needed is a coherent and deeper collaboration between industry and academia, faster technology transfers, and a sharper focus on developing indigenous design capabilities. All this would facilitate the transition from being a production economy to a product nation. We need to set clear targets when domestic firms move beyond exporting devices to exporting ideas, and the world begins using GPUs, software, and AI models designed in India.
