India has made an aggressive push to attract more than $200 billion in investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure over the next two years as it seeks to position itself as a global hub for AI computing and applications at a time when capacity, capital and regulations are becoming strategic assets.
The plans were outlined on Tuesday by Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw (pictured above) at the Indian government-backed five-day AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, attended by senior executives from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and other global technology companies. To attract investment, the government is implementing a mix of fiscal incentives, state-backed venture capital and policy support aimed at attracting a larger share of the global AI value chain to the South Asian country.
India’s pitch comes as US tech giants including Amazon, Google and Microsoft have already done has committed approximately $70 billion to expand AI and cloud infrastructure in the country, giving New Delhi a basis to argue that it can combine scale, cost advantages and policy incentives to attract the next wave of global investment in AI computing.
While most of the expected $200 billion is expected to flow into AI infrastructure – including data centers, chips and supporting systems, and will include the already approximately $70 billion promised by Big Tech Companies – Vaishnaw said the Indian government also expects an additional $17 billion in investments in deep tech and AI applications, highlighting a push to go beyond infrastructure and capture a larger share of the value chain.
This effort is supported by recent policy decisions aimed at making India a more attractive base for AI computing, including long-term tax relief for export-oriented cloud services and a ₹100 billion (approx. $1.1 billion) government-backed venture program that focuses on high-risk areas such as AI and advanced manufacturing. Earlier this month, New Delhi also extended the period for which deep-tech companies qualify as startups to 20 years and raised the revenue threshold for startup-specific benefits to ₹3 billion (about $33.08 million).
“We have seen VCs making money available for dtech startups,” Vaishnaw said at a press conference on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. “We’ve seen VCs and other players commit money to big solutions and big applications. We’ve seen VCs commit money to further research into cutting-edge models.”
India plans to do that scale shared computing capacity under the IndiaAI mission on top of the existing 38,000 GPUs, the minister said, and another 20,000 units will be added in the coming weeks, signaling what he described as the next phase of the country’s AI strategy.
Looking ahead, Vaishnaw said the Indian government is preparing a second phase of its AI mission, with a stronger focus on research and development, innovation and broader distribution of AI tools, along with further expansion of shared computing capacity, as India looks to broaden access to AI infrastructure beyond a small group of companies.
This push also faces structural challenges, including access to reliable power and water for energy-intensive data centers, underscoring the execution risks as India attempts to build out years of AI infrastructure in a much shorter time frame.
Acknowledging these challenges, Vaishnaw said the government was aware of the pressure AI infrastructure would put on energy and water supplies, and pointed to India’s energy mix – with more than half of installed generation capacity coming from clean sources – as an advantage as demand from data centers rises.
Whether India can deliver on this vision will matter far beyond its borders as companies seek new venues for AI computing amid rising costs, capacity constraints and increasing global competition.
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