India reserves a seat at the global AI table
By Ujjaini Dutta
India hasn’t created the next OpenAI or DeepSeek, but it is likely to keep benefiting from the global artificial intelligence buildout. This month Alphabet's 
GOOG Google unveiled plans to invest $15 billion over the next five years to set up an AI data centre in the country in partnership with AdaniConneX and Airtel. It followed hot on the heels of an announcement of a similar $7-billion initiative by software services giant Tata Consultancy Services 
TCS. Even if the South Asian country doesn't emerge as a leading innovator, the signs suggest it can be a centre for model training and inferencing activities.
T he two investments alone could more than triple India's overall existing data centre capacity to more than 4 gigawatts, Breakingviews calculates b ased on TCS' estimate that each 150 megawatt of capacity will require a capital expenditure of $1 billion. It's a big pivot to heavy investment for the asset-light Indian software giant, which reckons demand in the next five to six years could increase almost 10 times, surpassing existing committed capacity of up to 6 gigawatts.
Currently India hosts nearly 20% of the world's data but just 3% of global data centre capacity. On paper, the latest investments will still leave the country far from the data centre big league . By comparison, installed capacity in the U.S. is 53.7 GW and 31.9 GW in China.
But India's large AI-ready workforce ensures big global companies will keep flocking to the market; Google's AI hub in Andhra Pradesh – its largest outside of the U.S. – will connect to its three existing R&D centres in the tech cities of Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune. U.S. chipmaker Intel 
INTC says India has "massive amounts of data to train" machine learning and large language models on.
And demand will continue to grow so long as New Delhi prods AI solution providers to store data locally; In August, Sam Altman's OpenAI launched its cheapest ChatGPT subscription plan to target the country's billion-odd internet users, following rival Perplexity, which is offering its Pro service to 360 million Bharti Airtel 
AIRTELPP.E1 telecom customers at no cost. On top of that, the government is utilising a 103 billion rupees ($1.2 billion) startup fund to help the country build up its own large language models and applications. India's AI infrastructure gap may fill up fast.
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CONTEXT NEWS
Google announced on October 14 that it would invest $15 billion to set up an artificial intelligence data centre in India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh over the next five years. Software services giant Tata Consultancy Services announced on October 9 that it will build a 1-gigawatt capacity AI data centre in India.
