India’s AI ambitions are often framed around chips, GPUs, and the race for cutting-edge models. But AI is much more than hardware. In this episode, Gopal Tomar and Dr Dheeraj Dwarakanath examine India’s AI stack from the ground up — from electricity, data centres, and semiconductor manufacturing to models, applications, languages, and digital public infrastructure.
The discussion explores what “sovereign AI” should mean for India, where India’s actual strengths and constraints lie, and whether the country should try to compete with the US and China on their terms or build an AI ecosystem around its own advantages. We also discuss India’s talent base, research capacity, UPI and digital public infrastructure, multilingual AI, frugal innovation, data governance, and the geopolitical implications of the global AI and semiconductor race.
The central question is simple: Does India need to win the cutting-edge AI race, or can it build a different and more consequential model of AI for scale?
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