CoinDCX, one of India's leading crypto exchanges, announced the introduction of Daily SIP, a new addition to its monthly SIP experience that lets users invest in crypto every day, starting at just Rs 100. According to the company, the update will give investors a tighter
Redmi Note 15 has become more expensive in India yet again, with Xiaomi revising the prices of both storage variants by Rs 2,000. The latest increase comes just weeks after an earlier price adjustment, making the phone significantly costlier than its launch price
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Apple reportedly bringing M6 chip and new colours to iMac later this year Apple is reportedly preparing a new 24-inch iMac with the M6 chip and new colours
Sonova launched its third hearing-aid platform utilising real-time AI on Monday, its latest effort to strengthen its position in a market that relies on rapid technology upgrades to shorten replacement cycles and attract first-time users. The Swiss company was the first one to roll
Apple shipments are expected to decline by around 2.1% in 2026, before returning to growth of around 2.8% in 2027, noted Counterpoint Research. However, it is likely to remain a comparatively resilient due to the sustained demand for the iPhone 17 series
On AI, India’s enthusiasm contends with fundamental constraints
On AI, India’s enthusiasm contends with fundamental constraints Premium
As the AI Impact Summit drew to a close on Friday, it was clear that the government sought, if at least for a week, to make India the centre for all things AI in the world. The crowds showed up, with half-a-million attendees thronging the expo and crowding out all the session rooms. World leaders and Ministers from dozens of countries waded through the heavily-regulated traffic to attend. AI heavyweights such as Sam Altman and Dario Amodei deliver keynotes.
By all means, the users are there: in a report on Friday, OpenAI published a telling insight into how Indians use AI: ChatGPT prompts from here take advantage of the firm’s most advanced data analysis, writing and technical tools available on the platform. This, the firm says, means that Indians have largely closed the “capability overhang,” the gap between what the latest large language models can do, and what they’re actually used for.
It is clear: India is addicted to the potential of AI across personal and professional spheres alike. That will have massive consequences for how the Internet is used, how LLMs diffuse into companies, and what lies ahead for knowledge work beyond the IT industry. As the implementation of Aadhaar, UPI and other such frameworks show, Indians either welcome or eventually embrace the use of digital technologies when it is possible to do so, and scale is more of an amplifier than a restraint, especially when an enthusiastic State is making a push.
A central problem is the infrastructure layer. For previous waves of technology, costs became so manageable that, at least for government projects, achieving sovereign computing resources was entirely an achievable goal. The physical servers of Aadhaar and UPI are within India, and the cost of running these systems is manageable.
Not so for AI, which has drastically disrupted the surprising power efficiency of the Internet. The graphics processing units (GPUs) powering AI — both in training LLMs and running “inference” on them — are in and of themselves expensive. The costs,however, are buried in the opex: AI training runs require millions of dollars’ worth of electricity, and inference in data centres also add up enormously.
India is the world’s most populous country, but only the third largest electricity producer; rural electrification was only substantially completed in the last decade. As with any scarce resource, electricity costs are bound to be challenging, especially when factoring in renewable energy goals, and India’s target to be carbon neutral by 2070. That bodes well for power generation and transmission companies, with guaranteed near-captive clients. It could, however, drive energy prices, at least for AI, up.
The government’s support for the IndiaAI Mission does offer research aid in key areas of urgent interest: for instance, Sarvam AI’s 35 and 105 billion parameter models have benefited from the common compute facility, giving them subsidised access to government-purchased GPUs for training runs. Sarvam, BharatGen and other initiatives are filling the gap that LLMs have in Indian languages, a key step for deployment. (Sarvam’s models are planned to be open source but since that step has not yet been taken, it is hard to pinpoint the extent to which they introduce novel savings and techniques.)
India has the world’s second largest AI userbase, driven by wide Internet coverage. As such, inference costs are likely to be huge. Availability of capital for local infrastructure development is a major challenge: U.S. hyperscalers estimate their collective datacentre spending in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The biggest infrastructure investments within Indian borders are currently an outpost of that spending. That leads to a risk of India remaining a net inference importer, either through foreign data centres, or foreign-owned data centres.
The India Semiconductor Mission and hardware assembly initiatives have been largely executed with efficiency, and interest for all its programmes have largely met many of the stated ambitions: smartphones are now among India’s most valuable exports, even as a domestic component manufacturing ecosystem takes shape; capital subsidies have attracted Micron’s packaging facility in Gujarat; and the production-linked incentives for a range of IT hardware and sub-assemblies have gained interest from numerous firms.
But for a mix of historical and economic reasons, the electronics manufacturing ecosystem is, at this point of history, is not a heavy-hitter that holds strategic leverage beyond de-risking hedges by multinationals seeking to avoid volatile outcomes of overly relying on China. There is no disagreement that semiconductor and electronics manufacturing capacity — key for indigenising infrastructure — takes decades to arrive at.
The moment may be critical: if AI ends up remaking the world economy in irreversible ways, such as by cheaply replacing knowledge work at scale, India may find a decades-long industrial policy prematurely clashing against a future these measures are designed to safeguard against. In the most crucial period of this transformation, if AI builders are to be believed — the coming two years — India faces a U.S. jealously guarding and nurturing its own AI industry as the world’s foundation. There are few signs that there will be a serious challenge to this dominance in the coming years.
If there are any structural green shoots in India’s AI ecosystem, it is human capital. Much of Silicon Valley’s innovations have been made possible by a steady flow of foreign-born excellence, much of it Indian. The C-suite of the Big Tech firms bears testament to this. As with past generations of brain drain, this is a mixed blessing: while remittances from talent moving abroad is certainly helpful for the economy, retaining enough of the best talent is crucial. To that end, India faces both the investment appetite to pay competitive salaries, and struggles in many parts of the country to offer a quality of life that can urge many to choose the homeland over a different home for their children.
That is on the AI and chip research side. In the IT industry, Claude’s latest models — doing in minutes what would take a human coder a day — have spooked investors about the industry, and further undermined the ability of this industry (benefiting from a not-insignificant amount of labour arbitrage) to act as a path to the middle class.
The government’s stated path so far has taken many of these limitations into account: IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has batted for India mastering deployment, and making the best use of the resources available to it. Yet, there is a major pitfall to be cognisant of: seeking economies is not the exclusive reserve of the constrained.
Published - February 24, 2026 07:00 am IST
Artificial Intelligence
Source: TheHindu
Related Posts: Technology
The Indian government has ordered Google to shut down hundreds of Firebase accounts that have been linked to online and bank scams, affecting many people in the country. These scams have become a major issue in India over the last few years and most of it is linked to the rise of digital payments
11 hours ago
India's semiconductor market is projected to reach USD 155 billion by CY31, implying a (CAGR) of 20 per cent and taking the country's share of global to roughly 9 per cent by 2031, according to a report by . The report said India's semiconductor opportunity is being supported by a combination of
11 hours ago
![Washington DC [US], August 23 (ANI): Dr Dre, the legendary hip-hop producer and performer, sees AI as another tool in the music-tech toolbox akin to](http://newsorbit360.com/files/news/en/imgs/its-a-new-tool-for-creativity.jpg?height=520)
Washington DC [US], August 23 (ANI): Dr Dre, the legendary hip-hop producer and performer, sees AI as another tool in the music-tech toolbox akin to synthesisers and asserted that only people "who have trouble creating" are afraid of AI, reported Variety.Washington DC [US], August 23 (ANI): Dr Dre
14 hours ago
Vine is back? Divine app revives six-second videos, bans AI content Vine is making a comeback through Divine, a new six-second video app backed by Jack Dorsey that bans AI content and brings back old Vine videos. Published on: Aug 23, 2026, 22:41:11 IST By Durva More Prefer HTon Google Share via
14 hours ago
The story so far: The head of Flock, a surveillance camera maker-operator that works with a range of clients in the U.S., issued an apology this month after the Washington Post reported that multiple law enforcement officers had abused his product network
1 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Fujifilm X-T30 III review: The specs are familiar, but the shooting experience is hard to ignore The Fujifilm X-T30 III is a tiny
1 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. I tracked my sleep with these smartwatches to see which ones make sleep tracking useful I tested smartwatches with sleep tracking to see how useful their sleep insights are for
1 days ago
firms have become “somewhat marginal” in the artificial intelligence investment cycle given the scale of capital required, and large enterprises should increasingly fund AI companies alongside traditional investors, managing director said on Saturday
1 days ago
Amid growing competition from Anthropic and Chinese AI models, OpenAI said it is cutting the prices of its frontier GPT-5.6 Sol model for developers by more than 20% for the next three months. The price cuts are effective on OpenAI's application programming interface, or API
1 days ago
Union Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday indicated that Apple could broaden its manufacturing operations in India beyond iPhones, potentially adding products such as MacBooks and iPads. Speaking at the launch of the Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme (MPMS)
1 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Best 32-inch smart TVs in India 2026: Top picks across budgets for sharper viewing, smart features and entertainment Explore 32-inch smart TVs with Full HD and QLED options
2 days ago
Nvidia has made a minority investment in privately held to develop infrastructure to power AI across the U.S., the companies said on Friday. The investment will help Cloverleaf develop sites for the data centers, while Nvidia will support infrastructure buildouts for AI computing
2 days ago
Yuval Noah Harari on the economic and political perils of AI Humanity must not entrust its lot to clever machines, the bestselling historian warns Updated on: Aug 22, 2026, 14:21:37 IST The Economist Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link YUVAL NOAH HARARI describes himself as a historian who
2 days ago
Anthropic plans to let enterprise customers exercise greater control over their data when using its advanced AI models, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday, marking a shift in the Claude chatbot maker’s data retention policy
2 days ago
Asset manager suffered a last month in which hackers stole some personal information, according to a letter on Friday. The New York-based firm was among dozens of prominent U.S. and other businesses that were recently targeted by ransom-seeking hackers who use phone calls to compromise their
2 days ago
Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal has revealed a major design update for Temple, the wearable technology project he has been developing, saying the latest version is now less than half the size of the device previously shown. According to Goyal
2 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Best Tech Rakhi gifts under ₹1,000: 5 gadgets your brother or sister will actually use Whether your sibling is a fitness enthusiast or someone who's always on their phone
2 days ago
, a startup building data centers in space, said on Friday it had raised $250 million at a $2.3 billion valuation, as it looks to expand AI infrastructure through . SpaceX's blockbuster IPO has rekindled investor interest in the space industry
2 days ago
The new Apple iPhone range is expected to arrive in September, with the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max among the key models revealed. The new lineup is also rumoured to include Apple’s first foldable iPhone. However, for customers seeking a traditional flagship smartphone
2 days ago
As Apple gears up for its major September iPhone event, the company is expected to unveil the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max and an all-new foldable iPhone. The iPhone 18 Pro models are tipped to feature a faster A20 Pro chipset, larger batteries and upgraded cameras. However
2 days ago
Samsung Galaxy S26 FE launch on August 27? Here’s what the new Galaxy event could reveal Samsung launched the Galaxy S26 series globally back in February this year. Updated on: Aug 21, 2026, 17:09:08 IST Prefer HTon Google Share via Copy link You may be interested in 32% OFF Samsung Galaxy S26
2 days ago
As companies deploy AI across more users and workloads, Snowflake says attention is shifting to token costs, model choice, spending controls and returns. As AI moves from pilots to production, Indian enterprises are beginning to ask a familiar question: “Kitna deti hai?” Only this time
2 days ago
Editorial independence is core to our work. Some links may earn us a commission, without influencing our opinions. Everyday cooking can mean more than reheating when these convection ovens bring several cooking methods together Capacity, cooking modes and preset menus vary across these convection
2 days ago
![New Delhi [India], August 20 (ANI): The next phase of enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) will be less about deploying the latest models and more about](http://newsorbit360.com/files/news/en/imgs/next-phase-of-enterprise-ai-not-about-deploying-models.png?height=520)
New Delhi [India], August 20 (ANI): The next phase of enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) will be less about deploying the latest models and more about managing their continuous upgrades, costs and performance, according to a report by Straive
3 days ago
![New Delhi [India], August 20 (ANI): India's key strength in artificial intelligence lies in the applications layer, while the country is simultaneously](http://newsorbit360.com/files/news/en/imgs/indias-ai-strength-lies-in-applications.jpg?height=520)
New Delhi [India], August 20 (ANI): India's key strength in artificial intelligence lies in the applications layer, while the country is simultaneously building capabilities in data centres and other digital infrastructure, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said in an interview with Morgan Stanley
3 days ago
Google has a back-to-college gift! Get 1 year of free 400GB storage, better learning tools and higher Gemini limits Google is expanding its student perks with discounted premium services and new ways to research, revise and learn through Gemini and Search. Updated on: Aug 20, 2026
4 days ago
The first healthcare touchpoint for more than half of India’s population are the frontline workers such as ASHA and Anganwadi workers. Strengthening their confidence with AI-enabled tools on their hand-held devices, will significantly improve the quality and reach of primary healthcare in the
4 days ago
