The US’ power move to establish itself as a global leader in AI infrastructure brought together unlikely players to spearhead this mission, including Oracle chief Larry Ellison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.
While the so-called AI dominion forces united in the far West, what does all this mean for India? Should we panic, get our act together, and start our own version of the Stargate Project? Read on.
Ajai Chowdhry, HCL co-founder and chairman of the Mission Governing Board of India’s National Quantum Mission, expressed concern over the growing shift towards taking control of AI. “We seem to be getting to the weaponisation of tech. For strategic autonomy, we must create our own AI doctrine and have strong control over our data,” Chowdhry told AIM.
Chowdhry suggested creating domestic hardware for data centres in order to control our data.
India Still Debates
Source: X
Interestingly, just a day before Trump’s announcement, India started debating AI dominance, with tech leaders representing two schools of thought. Perplexity leader Aravind Srinivas said Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani was wrong to push for building on top of existing models rather than building foundational models from scratch.
“Nandan Nilekani is awesome, and he’s done far more for India than any of us can imagine through Infosys, UPI, etc. But he’s wrong in pushing Indians to ignore model training skills and just focus on building on top of existing models,” said Srinivas.
China’s release of the open-source DeepSeek-R1 model, which is cost-effective, on par with OpenAI’s o1, and distributed under the MIT license, strengthened Srinivas’ case. Desperate to beat DeepSeek, the Perplexity CEO even agreed to invest $1 million and spend five hours a week guiding people willing to work “to make India great again, in the context of AI”.
Furthermore, he is ready to invest another $10 million to beat DeepSeek R1’s benchmarks. Former IT minister Rajeev Chandrashekar chimed into the conversation to further the cause.
Source: X
Similarly, Gaurav Aggarwal, who leads AI/ML initiatives at Jio, was excited about Srinivas’s initiative. “I am glad people are waking up to it finally. I left Google Research 1.5 years ago to do exactly this. Not much support from the Indian ecosystem so far, but [I] cannot really complain as it is my desire/struggle to see my country not get AI-colonised,” he wrote on X.
Srinivas’s offer has, in fact, drawn Indian AI startup founders to join the cause.
Bengaluru-based Smallest.ai startup founder Sudarshan Kamath shared his pitch on LinkedIn, hoping to connect with Srinivas. “Would like to make a pitch to him purely based on merit. We are not saying we ‘can’ build great AI out of India. We have already built it,” he said, promising to share their technical benchmarks to prove the same.
Techies Focus on Research
The Indian tech community poured in their opinions, criticising the government and investors for not helping the cause.
Speaking with AIM, researcher and founder of Wingify Paras Chopra said he believes in the “bottom-up, instead of a top-down,” approach, where entrepreneurs and researchers drive the process. “Top-down support makes sense once we have bottom-up potential,” he said.
Chopra had earlier shared his views on India-based AI labs focusing on India-specific problems when the internet is ‘boundary-less’. “You can be niche-focused, but at least be SOTA in that area,” he said.
Interestingly, Zerodha CTO Kailash Nadh recently told AIM that funding for serious, high-quality AI research is way more important than GPUs. “Solid research capability and depth is what will lay the true foundation for AI capabilities,” he said.
India is Building
The ensuing conversations have only proven the eagerness of the Indian tech community to build models from scratch. Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, which is building generative AI models, recently met government officials to discuss building India’s sovereign LLM.
Sarvam co-founder Pratyush Kumar invited Srinivas to join his mission. “Aravind, at SarvamAI we are building sovereign models that combine deep reasoning and Indic language skills. Would love to have you join this mission!
Meanwhile, IESA president Ashok Chandak considers the Stargate Project as an opportunity to accelerate India’s AI ambition through partnerships with the US. This can be achieved by leveraging India’s role in ICET and IPEF, co-developing cutting-edge technologies and scaling its domestic capabilities.
“Learning from the Stargate Project, India could conceptualise and implement its large-scale initiatives to strengthen its AI ecosystem,” he told AIM.
While initiatives are pouring in from various directions, it will be interesting to see if an ‘Indian Project Stargate’ emerges. It’s probably time to unite our tech forces.
