CAN INDIA LEAD IN AI?

While the world measures AI power through massive models and vast GPU clusters, India’s route runs through app strength, careful engineering, and a growing appetite for purposeful AI

- NIKHIL ABHISHEK

VERY few months, a new global model launch resets the scoreboard. ‘The phrase “AI race” gets thrown around to describe everything from chip manufacturing to chatbot popularity, often without a clear sense of what is actually being measured.

If the race is about building frontier-scale models that sit in the same league as Chat-GPT or DeepSeek, the contest today is dominated by the United States and China, backed by vast compute budgets and tightly integrated research ecosystems. Look a little closer, however, and the picture becomes more layered, and India’s position more diffuse.

The AI landscape can be divided into at least four distinct arenas. There is the frontier model layer, where a handful of laboratories train enormous systems on thousands of GPUs. There is the compute infrastructure layer, which decides who can afford to experiment at that scale. There is the research talent layer, which produces new algorithms and architectures. Finally there is the adoption layer, in which governments, companies, and professionals actually use these systems in their work.