India's silent AI revolution: Infra fuels the new digital core

As India's digital ambition meets reality, enterprises are quietly turning to robust AI infrastructure as the backbone of strategic transformation.

- BY SHUBHENDU PARTH & DHIRENDRA PRATAP SINGH

A quiet force is reshaping India's enterprise landscape—not with the hype of chatbots or robotic automation, but with the rigour of computation, the elegance of architecture, and the foresight of system design.

At the heart of this transformation lies artificial intelligence (Al), yes—but it is the infrastructure powering it, which is driving real, scalable, and strategic impact across industries.

While Al dominates boardroom discussions and press announcements, it is the invisible but intelligent infrastructure—spanning compute, storage, and connectivity—that is quietly becoming the real differentiator in enterprise success. The GPU clusters crunching health data in hospitals, the edge servers humming silently in factories, and the hybrid clouds calculating fraud probabilities at banks—these are the unsung workhorses of India's digital transformation.

FROM HYPE TO HABITAT: INDIA'S AI EVOLUTION

India's Al adoption is entering its decisive phase. According to the EY-NASSCOM AI Adoption Index, nearly 65% of enterprises in India have moved beyond pilot experiments to live Al deployments. Another 71% plan to ramp up Al spending over the next 12 months. This wave spans sectors—from technology and telecom to BFSI and retail, and healthcare and manufacturing—each betting on Al to redefine operations.

But this transformation cannot happen in isolation.

“India’s Al infrastructure is evolving from cloud consumer to sovereign creator—powered by indigenous innovation, policy-driven scale, and ethical foresight,” says Hirdey Vikram, CMO and Senior VP, Netweb Technologies. He points to platforms like Skylus and strategic investments in data centres and semiconductor ecosystems as early signs that India is building its own Al core.