“The AI economy’s foundation will be the infrastructure beneath it”

PANKAJ MALIK, CEO & Whole-time Director, Invenia-STL Networks, discusses why India’s AI ambitions will depend on execution discipline, fibre depth, data centres and resilient digital infrastructure

- By Noor Fathima Warsia

What does an AI-ready digital backbone really mean for India?

The smartest model is only as good as the infrastructure it runs on. Much of India’s infrastructure is not ready for what AI demands. An AI-ready digital backbone means connectivity, compute and security designed to work together, not procured separately from vendors who operate in silos. It means enterprises should be honest about their infrastructure gaps before announcing AI initiatives, rather than treating infrastructure as an afterthought.

India has real ambition here, and the market momentum is genuine. But ambition has to be matched with investment at the infrastructure layer, in high-bandwidth fibre, low-latency networks, GPU-ready data centres and intelligent security, not just at the application layer.

The nations and enterprises that get this right early will have a structural advantage that compounds over time.

The AI economy’s foundation will not be a model or a platform. It will be the infrastructure beneath it.

As AI workloads grow, how are data centres changing?

The data centre of 2019 and the data centre of 2026 are fundamentally different. What was designed for storage and enterprise ERP systems is now being re-engineered for AI inference, model training and data-intensive computing at a scale the industry had not previously planned for.