Why AI Sovereignty is Key to India’s Tech & Cultural Dominance

Did you know that by 2027, India will be a top player on the global AI leader-board, with $17 billion in investments? If that’s surprising, buckle up for a ringside view of the real deal: A high-stakes race for “Technological sovereignty.”

What is sovereign AI? Simply put, it refers to a nation’s ability to develop, deploy, and control artificial intelligence technologies using its own infrastructure, data, and workforce. And why is this important?

Outside science-fiction nothing has ever come close to AI’s potential in rivalling the human brain. But here is the kicker: As we move forward, AI might just start thinking for itself, unleashing forces powerful enough to change everything around us—industries, economies, societies, and life itself.

Therefore, though it is unlocking trillions in economic value, the big stake transcends wealth or convenience. It’s about control. With AI set to drive every major decision, a nation’s ability to develop and control its own AI infrastructure is becoming increasingly critical for staying competitive and securing its future.

Sovereign AI ensures that nations can dictate their own rules, preserve their cultural identity, and address their unique needs. It is the key to staying ahead, both economically and geopolitically, in an era where tech-driven power defines the global balance.

The Future and Infrastructure

Sovereign AI encompasses physical and data infrastructures. The latter includes sovereign foundation models, such as LLMs (large language models), developed by local teams and trained on local datasets.

While countries can take control of their future and create models that work for their benefit, ethical frameworks are crucial to ensure fairness, especially for nations with limited resources or talent. These issues will be key going forward.

Next, and perhaps most importantly, the world needs to find the balance between self-sufficiency and collaboration. Sovereign AI could unravel the already fragile and fragmented global digital economy as nations race win the race.

Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, pointed to the rise of “sovereign AI” at an earnings-call in November 2023 as a driver of demand for his company’s AI chips. “The number of sovereign AI clouds is really quite significant,” Huang said in the call. “Nvidia wants to enable every company to build its own custom AI models.” During his visit to India in October, he urged India to seize the opportunity to become the global AI production hub. A photograph of Sunil Gupta, Chief Executive, Yotta, sitting atop a truck loaded with Nvidia’s AI chips, visually echoed this sentiment, symbolising a pivotal moment in India’s progress on the AI racetrack.

In March 2024, Yotta, secured the delivery of 4,000 Nvidia AI chips—the first shipment of its kind to India — in the face of fierce global competition among nations vying for a competitive edge in the AI race. Its success in clinching the shipment meant that India’s AI start-ups and researchers could now develop AI models and applications at a local data centre, reducing costs by paying in rupees rather than dollars. “Sometimes you feel humble and sometimes a bit arrogant when all of India’s AI—be it IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, Sarvam or Zoho —seems to be running on your infrastructure,” says Gupta.

Homegrown AI

In the digital age, AI influences not only technology but also culture and narrative control. Without AI sovereignty nations risk losing their ability to defend their cultural identity to external forces. They stand to lose the power to protect local voices and ensure that unique cultural perspectives are accurately represented.

A prime example of this shift is Sarvam AI. Founded by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, the home-grown large language model (LLM) it launched in October outperformed peers like Meta’s Llama and Hugging Face’s Gemma, despite being trained on smaller datasets.

Sarvam, leveraging Yotta’s AI cloud, is making notable contributions to India’s AI landscape. Raghavan highlighted the importance of a domestic AI infrastructure: “To train AI models with data that must stay in India, we need a domestic cluster of AI chips. This supports both data sovereignty and innovation.”

Yotta’s founder, Gupta is making AI more accessible to India’s innovators by offering affordable AI cloud services to colleges for as little as Rs 5,000 per month, empowering the next generation of AI researchers and developers.

Shaping the Future

In an interview with Outlook Business, Shilpa Kolhatkar, Global Head of AI Nations at NVIDIA, discussed India’s approach to AI, the transformative potential of AI, the concept of AI factories, and more. When asked about the shift from on-premises solutions to the cloud over the last two decades, she explained why it’s important, from a national perspective, to frame AI in a similar light.

Drawing a parallel with energy independence, she said: “The ability of a country to have sovereignty, to have that independence, to produce AI independently and domestically is extremely important, especially given the current geopolitical situation,” she said.

Just like energy independence, governments are increasingly focused on establishing on-premise, sovereign data centres, governed by their own laws and regulations, to maintain control over critical technological infrastructure.

A notable example of this shift is India’s $1.24 billion investment in a sovereign AI platform, which includes a supercomputer with 10,000 GPUs and the creation of a new academic institution. India ranks 10th globally for private AI investments, with $1.4 billion in inflows.

As the world continues to evolve, sovereign AI solutions have the potential to level the playing field. These solutions promote inclusiveness and can help countries use AI to solve problems unique to their needs. Will India rise to the challenge and lead the world in AI sovereignty?"