Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to redefine sovereignty going forward and thus India must build its own critical AI infrastructure instead of relying on infrastructure overseas, Jeet Adani, Adani Group executive director and son of Gautam Adani, said on Thursday.
He emphasized that the $100-billion worth of AI infrastructure investment announced earlier this week by the ports-to-renewables conglomerate is to ensure that India’s AI future is “secured, sovereign, and built at national scale”.
Addressing the India AI Impact Summit, Adani prescribed three pillars of sovereignty he believes will “define India’s AI century”— energy sovereignty, compute and cloud sovereignty, and services sovereignty.
“In earlier centuries, nations built steel plants and shipyards. In the digital age, nations invested in semiconductor ecosystems. In today’s AI age, sovereign compute capacity becomes strategic infrastructure. It matters where compute resides, under whose jurisdiction it operates, and who controls access. Cloud sovereignty does not mean isolation. It means autonomy,” Adani said.
He stressed that India must host critical AI workloads domestically, build data centre ecosystems at scale, and ensure access to domestic high-performance compute for the country’s startups, academia, defence, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors.
“If intelligence infrastructure is concentrated externally, strategic leverage concentrates externally. And external concentration creates national fragility. In earlier centuries, nations have built navies to secure trade routes. Today, we have to build a sovereign compute to secure intelligence routes,” he said.
Underlining that energy sovereignty translates into “intelligence sovereignty”, Adani emphasised that in today’s AI era, power grids and data grids become inseparable and India must press ahead with renewable energy expansion.
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“AI is written in code. But it runs on electricity…If a nation’s energy systems are fragile, its intelligence systems are fragile…India’s renewable expansion across solar, wind, storage is no longer just a climate policy, it’s a strategic infrastructure policy,” Adani said. “So, what will be different in India because of this? Renewable clusters will co-locate with AI data centres. Industrial corridors will integrate energy and compute planning. Storage and grid stability will become national priorities.”
On services sovereignty in the AI age, Adani noted that while India’s information technology revolution made it a global services powerhouse, much of the productivity dividend was captured by other countries, and argued that the AI revolution offers a “once-in-a-century opportunity” to change this.
He insisted AI must first serve as a “force multiplier” for Indian citizens before it becomes a “margin multiplier” for others.
“Our AI must first amplify our Indian productivity — enhance our agricultural resilience, personalise our education at massive scale, optimise our networks of logistics and ports, improve our energy and distribution efficiency, modernise our manufacturing competitiveness, expand our healthcare diagnostics across rural India, and deepen our financial inclusion across Tier 2 and 3 towns and villages,” Adani said.
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Talking about the Adani group’s recently announced $100-billion investment to build a sovereign, green-energy-powered AI infrastructure platform, he said that it is not just a data centre expansion but the trigger for a 5-gigawatt and $250-billion integrated energy-and-compute ecosystem “engineered to anchor India’s intelligence revolution”.
“By integrating renewable energy, grid resilience, and hyperscale compute into a unified architecture, this commitment ensures that India’s AI future is not only powered but secured, sovereign, and built at national scale,” Adani said.
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