India’s AI moment needn't be a climate reckoning

AI ambition versus climate responsibility is a false binary. It only appears real when we treat the two as separate portfolios thought about by segregated leadership

- Arunabha Ghosh

We must build something else. Call it frugal, even Gandhian, AI—fit-for-purpose, resource-efficient, aligned with public purpose from the start.

(AFP)

In New Delhi, the first India Artificial Intelligence (AI) Impact Summit has brought together governments, technology firms, multilateral agencies, and innovators to examine how AI can benefit people, the planet, and inclusive progress. Anchored in the Global South, the gathering signals a shift from receiving norms to shaping them. This matters because the next billion people will come of age in Asia and Africa, whose economies, public services, and climate resilience will be built alongside, or locked into, AI systems being designed and deployed today.

India has an opportunity to model its own path. But there is a tension that this summit has made plain: AI requires vast resources. A single hyperscale facility can draw as much electricity as an aluminium smelter. In 2024, India’s data centres consumed an estimated 150 billion litres of water. By 2030, that figure will more than double. According to recent analysis by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) and SYSTEMIQ, only five of 15 current state-level data centre policies embed sustainability provisions. Yet, resource intensiveness is only half the story. The deeper risk is that infrastructure built without foresight erodes the very thing expansion requires—social licence. The land-water-energy nexus compounds these pressures in ways that isolated metrics cannot capture. India's blueprint for AI must, therefore, be not only efficient but co-owned: By states, utilities, and the communities that host it.