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India’s push for sovereign AI to lift Asia’s tech ecosystem
A landmark AI infrastructure deal between Yotta and Gorilla Technology aims to deploy up to 36,000 GPUs in India, creating a blueprint for commercially viable AI at scale across the region
India’s efforts to shore up its artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure will bolster, rather than cannibalise, established Southeast Asian tech hubs like Singapore and Malaysia, according to industry leaders from the subcontinent.
Speaking at the Gitex AI Asia 2026 conference in Singapore, tech executives at the forefront of India’s AI infrastructure boom outlined how the country’s massive scale will serve as a testing ground for the broader Asian market.
Sunil Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Indian datacentre giant Yotta Data Services, and Jay Chandan, chairman and CEO of Gorilla Technology, a UK-based supplier of AI-powered smart city applications, recently inked a landmark agreement to deploy thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) across India.
During a fireside chat, the two leaders discussed the details of the rollout, driven by New Delhi’s push to build sovereign AI capabilities to protect national data and cater to domestic needs.
With a population of 1.4 billion, including a billion smartphone users connected to the internet, India currently accounts for over half of the world’s digital payment transactions. This has led to an increased demand for processing and storing data within the country's borders.
And with the growing adoption of AI in recent years, users are now worried about what will happen to their data, Gupta said, particularly in terms of privacy and security concerns regarding how their information is used and managed by AI systems.
“People want sovereign AI and sovereign models trained on sovereign data. That’s a huge wave in India right now, supported fully by the government,” Gupta noted.
Through the state-backed IndiaAI Mission, the Indian government is heavily subsidising computing costs, paying infrastructure providers to allocate GPUs to local model builders, researchers, and academia.
“We’re looking at about 5,000 GPU cards to be deployed for our AI workloads in the first six months,” said Chandan, adding that the partnership aims to eventually scale up to 36,000 GPUs.
Under the agreement, Gorilla will provide the GPU infrastructure, while Yotta will operate the GPUs at its Navi Mumbai datacentre to deliver AI compute services, including GPU clusters, bare-metal GPUs, AI lab workstations and AI model endpoints to enterprises and government customers.
Solving the ROI challenge
Gupta noted that while many enterprises have developed AI use cases across a range of industries, including finance, media, entertainment and manufacturing, not all have made it to production.
“The CFO [chief financial officer] is not convinced. If I invest in these GPUs, models, datasets, and skill sets, will I get a return? We have to bring down the cost so they can cross that line into production. If they start experimenting and become successful, then they’ll scale up,” he added.
By offering GPU infrastructure through an elastic, low-cost consumption model, Yotta and Gorilla aim to make enterprise AI commercially viable, generating returns on investments within three to five years, Chandan said.
However, the build-up of India’s AI infrastructure has raised questions about whether the subcontinent could syphon tech investments away from Southeast Asian digital hubs.
“In all the meetings I’ve had, people ask, ‘Is India going to replace Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam?’ That’s not going to happen,” Chandan said. “India is not here to replace anybody. India is here to help you build scale and velocity. It’s here to show you that you can build these large-scale models, and you can be successful with an efficient cost base.”
Gupta added that India’s sprawling datacentres are also helping to solve global supply chain challenges. He revealed that due to GPU shortages elsewhere, enterprises from Europe and the Middle East are increasingly looking to India to host their AI training and inference workloads.
“Because India is geopolitically safe compared to many other areas, it has the potential to become a major hotspot for serving global AI demand,” Gupta said.
Read more about AI in India
- Open source AI gained recognition during the India AI Summit, but divisions over governance, market concentration and regulatory power cast doubt on whether the technology will benefit society.
- Nvidia has announced a slew of partnerships with India’s leading infrastructure and technology providers to help the subcontinent build up its sovereign AI capabilities.
- Research from Thoughtworks reveals that while 77% of global businesses are focused on generating revenue from AI initiatives, markets such as India are leading the charge in agentic AI adoption, job creation and executive confidence.
- Microsoft announces major expansion of its AI footprint in India’, teaming up with four of the country’s largest IT services companies to deploy agentic AI capabilities across enterprises.
