India has set out an aggressive push to attract more than $200 billion in artificial-intelligence infrastructure investment 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 regulation are becoming strategic assets.
The plans were outlined on Tuesday by India’s IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw (pictured above) at the Indian government-backed five-dayAI Impact Summitin New Delhi, attended by senior executives from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and other global technology firms. To attract investment, the government is rolling out a mix of tax incentives, state-backed venture capital, and policy support aimed at pulling more of the global AI value chain into the South Asian nation.
India’s pitch comes as U.S. technology giants, includingAmazon,Google, andMicrosoft, have alreadycommitted about $70 billionto expand AI and cloud infrastructure in the country, giving New Delhi a foundation to argue it can combine scale, cost advantages, and policy incentives to attract the next wave of global AI computing investment.
While the bulk of the projected $200 billion is expected to flow into AI infrastructure — including data centers, chips, and supporting systems, and encompassing the around $70 billion alreadypledgedby Big Tech companies — Vaishnaw said the Indian government also anticipates an additional $17 billion of investment into deep-tech and AI applications, highlighting a push to move beyond infrastructure and capture more of the value chain.
The effort is backed by recent policy decisionsaimed at making India a more attractive base for AI computing, including long-term tax relief for export-oriented cloud services and a ₹100 billion (about$1.1 billion)government-backed venture programtargeting high-risk areas such as AI and advanced manufacturing. Earlier this month, New Delhi alsoextended the period for which deep-tech companiesqualify 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 committing funds for dtech startups,” Vaishnaw said at a press briefing on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. “We have seen VCs and other players committing funds for big solutions, big applications. We have seen VCs committing funds for further research in cutting-edge models.”
India plans toscale its shared compute capacityunder the IndiaAI Mission beyond its existing 38,000 GPUs, the minister said, with an additional 20,000 units to be added in the coming weeks, signalling 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 wider diffusion of AI tools, alongside further expansion of shared compute capacity, as India seeks to broaden access to AI infrastructure beyond a small group of companies.
The push also faces structural challenges, including access to reliable power and water for energy-intensive data centres, underlining the execution risks as India seeks to compress years of AI infrastructure build-out into a much shorter timeframe.
Vaishnaw acknowledged those challenges, saying the government was cognizant of the pressure AI infrastructure would place on power and water resources, 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 that vision will matter well beyond its borders, as companies seek new locations for AI computing amid rising costs, capacity constraints, and intensifying global competition.
Source: Techcrunch
