On a February afternoon in New Delhi, beneath the harsh lights of a cavernous convention hall, Prime Minister Narendra Modi paused at a booth, slipped on a pair of homegrown AI-powered eyeglasses and scanned the room. Then he asked a question: Did the device speak his native language, Gujarati?
The moment, part curiosity, part performance, signaled something larger. India, long cast as the world’s back office for code and customer service, was ready to chart its own course in artificial intelligence, in its own languages, for its own 1.45 billion people.
But India’s ambition to build and export a sovereign AI template across the world is colliding with structural constraints: years of underinvestment in compute capacity, a late start in building the most advanced AI models, deep reliance on foreign cloud providers and a venture capital culture wary of the vast, risky bets that define the global AI race.