India is the most populous country in the world, with well over 1.4 billion people, slightly more than China. With its economy at over $4 trillion and growing at 6.5%, it is the fourth largest economy in the world (after the US, China and Germany, having overtaken Japan) and is on course to be the third largest economy in the world within three years. India is known for its technology industry, with around 15 million workers in its $286 billion technology sector, twice as many technology workers as there are in the USA. The country has 900 million internet users. So, what is India doing about artificial intelligence (AI)?
In 2024, the Indian government launched a $1.25 billion project called IndiaAI, with the goal of establishing a public AI infrastructure. This includes providing graphic processing units (GPUs), which are the hardware that mostly powers AI, at a subsidised rate to start-up companies. There is a national repository, AIKosh, with hundreds of curated datasets and pre-trained AI models in various specific domains. The AI industry in India is expected to reach $17 billion in 2027, according to IT industry body Nasscom. There are state-level AI initiatives in various Indian states, including Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka, and projects like AgriStack, which applies AI and other digital services in agriculture, for things like crop monitoring, soil analytics and smart irrigation. India has the fourth most AI patents, behind China, the USA and Japan, ahead of South Korea. India does not restrict companies from transferring data across borders, making it more open than some other economies to AI companies.
India does not have any home-grown AI giants in the way that the USA and China have. Nonetheless, there are a number of interesting companies and initiatives. Sarvan aims to
Build an AI platform optimised for eleven Indian languages, a foundation language model hosted in India and intended for local deployment. Another initiative is AI4Bharat, an IIT Madras-based initiative aimed at creating open-source natural language processing models for Indian languages that can be used in telemedicine and education. Civil registration for documents such as birth, death and marriage certificates in Rajasthan is now handled by the Penchan Raj portal, which uses AI to support multilingual registration. In early 2025, Microsoft announced a partnership with several Indian companies, including a $3 billion investment in data centres. Projects associated with this initiative include healthcare pilots and a modernisation of the Indian railway network through AI projects. There was also a partnership with upGrad to train a million Indians in AI skills, notionally by the end of 2025. The pace of investment continues, with Google and Meta announcing partnerships with Reliance Industries in August 2025. In July 2025, AI vendor Perplexity announced its AI service would be free for a year to all 360 million Bharti Airtel customers in India.
India is a huge and rapidly developing country, with challenges as well as opportunities. Although it has a thriving high technology sector, the fragmented languages used present an issue of how to get data at scale. India has 22 official languages, like Hindi and Bengali, but there are 780 documented languages across the country, many of which have different dialects. Since large-scale training data is crucial to LLMs, this puts Indian at a disadvantage compared to countries like China, which has many linguistic variations but where Mandarin Chinese is standard. At the time of writing, there was an acute shortage of qualified engineers for open jobs in machine learning and AI.
India lacks a world-class AI university for foundational AI research, with a low R&D expenditure compared to the US. For computer science education, the US has MIT (ranked 3rd globally in 2025), Stanford (ranked 5th), Carnegie Mellon and Princeton (ranked joint 6th). China has Peking University (ranked 12th) and Tsinghua University (ranked 13th), and the UK has Oxford and Cambridge, ranked 1st and 2nd for computer science in 2025, with Imperial College ranked 8th. The highest-rated Indian university, the Indian Institute of Science, ranked 96th, with no others in the top 300. This is clearly a structural problem for any country with major AI ambitions. Some talented Indian technologists migrate abroad to earn more money than they can make locally, with almost a quarter of Silicon Valley jobs in March 2025 being held by people born in India.
Despite these challenges, India is a thriving country with a massive technology sector, rapid economic growth and a government that seems committed to investing in AI. It may take some time, but it is likely that India will be a major player in the years to come. OpenAI’s Sam Altman said that India can be “one of the leaders of the AI revolution”. Time will tell whether India can overcome its challenges and live up to that potential.
