India eyes $217 billion AI push, plans sovereign models for strategic needs: IT minister Vaishnaw

India on Tuesday said it wants to develop sovereign AI models to meet “strategic requirements” and weave in contextual nuances of the country as it plans to have localized tech solutions and IPs to counter the dominance of large language models (LLMs) broadly coming in from America and China.

As American LLMs such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and those from Anthropic and Perplexity gain ground across the world with Chinese DeepSeek and Qwen also expanding, the govt is keen to have India-specific models that are customized to the country’s needs, languages, cultural nuances, and industry requirements, IT and Electronics Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the India AI Impact summit.




Vaishnaw’s statement comes a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi also visited the India AI Impact Summit where he went into the pavilions of local companies such as Sarvam AI and gnani.ai that are building India-based solutions and IPs.

Vaishnaw said the sovereign AI models are important “so that we don’t remain dependent on anybody for our strategic requirements”. It also means India has the ability to develop new solutions. “That is all part of the sovereign AI process.”

The Minister also said that the govt is taking steps to contain the harmful effects of AI, where conversations are also being held with leaders of other countries. “… everybody believes that AI should be used for good, and that harmful impact should be contained through a techno-legal approach. It cannot do well only through passing of a law. It has to be done with a techno-legal approach where tech can be used. In our AI safety institute, we are working with many academic institutions to create technical solutions to prevent the harmful impact of AI.”

AI investments to top $200 billion

Vaishnaw said there is a big interest of international tech companies and global VCs to invest in India’s AI infrastructure and use cases. He pegged the investments planned over the next two years at around $217 billion.

“Around $200 billion is being invested in infrastructure. Over and above this, there will be another $17 billion in deep tech and application AI which is where VCs are committing funds. This number will only increase as we go forward, and confidence builds on India.”