Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw has declared that India firmly belongs in the “first bouquet of AI nations”, highlighting the country’s comprehensive strategy centred on large-scale AI diffusion, economic viability, and a techno-legal approach to governance.
Speaking at a World Economic Forum panel discussion titled “AI Power Play, No Referees” on January 20, 2026, Vaishnaw outlined India’s multi-layered engagement with AI architecture, which he described as comprising five key layers: application, model, chip, infrastructure, and energy. “India is actively working across all five layers and making good progress in each,” he said, adding that at the application layer, “India will probably be the biggest supplier of services to the world.”
Challenging the prevailing narrative that geopolitical AI power stems from owning the largest models, Vaishnaw argued that true influence will come from economics and deployment. “Return on investment in AI comes from enterprise-level deployment and productivity gains, not from creating very large models alone,” he stated. He pointed out that nearly 95 per cent of practical AI use cases can be addressed with models in the 20–50 billion parameter range — models that India already possesses and is actively deploying across sectors.
The Minister cautioned against over-reliance on massive models, noting they can be “switched off” and may even create economic stress for developers. Instead, he said the economics of the “fifth industrial revolution” will favour the lowest-cost solutions delivering the highest returns, with growing reliance on CPUs, smaller models, and custom silicon.
Drawing parallels with India’s success in digital public infrastructure, Vaishnaw detailed a systematic push for AI diffusion across every sphere of the economy. To address GPU scarcity, the government has established a public-private partnership providing a common national compute facility of around 38,000 GPUs. This subsidised resource is available to students, researchers, startups, and innovators at roughly one-third the global cost.
He outlined four core pillars of India’s AI strategy:
- A common compute facility through public-private partnership
- A free bouquet of AI models addressing most practical needs
- Large-scale skilling programmes targeting 10 million people
- Enabling India’s IT industry to pivot toward AI-driven productivity for domestic and global enterprises
On governance, Vaishnaw advocated a “techno-legal” approach, stressing that regulation must be backed by robust technical tools. “Regulation cannot rely solely on laws but must be supported by technical tools that mitigate harms such as bias and deepfakes,” he said, revealing ongoing Indian efforts to develop court-admissible deepfake detection systems, bias mitigation techniques, and proper model unlearning before enterprise deployment.
The panel was moderated by Ian Bremmer, President and Founder of Eurasia Group, and included Brad Smith (Vice-Chair and President, Microsoft), Kristalina Georgieva (Managing Director, IMF), and Khalid Al-Falih (Minister of Investment, Saudi Arabia).
