New Delhi, Feb 19 – India must develop its own artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure rather than relying on imports, according to Jeet Adani, an executive director at the Adani Group, who warned that AI will redefine national sovereignty.
Outlining a vision for India's "Intelligence Century," the youngest son of business tycoon Gautam Adani emphasized three key pillars of sovereignty – energy, computing, and cloud services – as central to India's AI strategy.
Jeet Adani stated that India must also secure sovereignty in energy, computing, and cloud services to safeguard its AI future.
“AI is code-based. But it relies on electricity… energy security is intelligence security. And sustainable energy becomes a competitive advantage,” he said, outlining plans to integrate renewable energy clusters with AI data centers and industrial corridors.
He added, “Cloud sovereignty does not mean isolation. It means autonomy… India must host critical AI workloads domestically… and provide domestic access to high-performance computing for our startups, academia, defense, healthcare, and manufacturing.”
Adani stressed that AI should first serve Indian citizens, boosting agriculture, education, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, and financial inclusion.
He cited the Adani Group's commitment of $100 billion to a sovereign, green-energy-powered AI platform, calling it “the catalyst for a 5-gigawatt, $250 billion integrated energy-and-compute ecosystem engineered to anchor India’s Intelligence Revolution.”
“The question is no longer whether India will participate in the AI century. The question is whether the AI century will imprint India’s values on its infrastructure, its intelligence, and its standards,” he said. “I believe – deeply and without hesitation – that it will.” He further stated, “Just as electricity powered industry reshaped geopolitics, the internet transformed commerce; artificial intelligence will redefine sovereignty.”
The central question before the country is not whether to adopt AI, but whether India will import intelligence – or architect it? Will it consume productivity – or create it? Will it rely on someone else’s system – or build its own?
Adani emphasized that the time for asking is now.
Detailing his sovereignty pillars, Adani warned, “Under peak load, advanced processors generate extraordinary heat. Systems throttle when power falters. Performance drops. This is not just an engineering detail. It is a strategic truth. If a nation’s energy systems are fragile, its intelligence systems are fragile.”
He added that India’s renewable expansion – solar, wind, and storage – is no longer just a climate policy. It is also strategic infrastructure policy. Renewable clusters will co-locate with AI data centers, and industrial corridors will integrate energy and compute planning.
On compute and cloud sovereignty, he said, “If energy is the fuel, compute is the factory. In earlier centuries, nations built steel plants and shipyards. In the digital age, nations invested in semiconductor ecosystems. In the AI age, sovereign compute capacity becomes strategic infrastructure.”
He said, “It matters where compute resides, under whose jurisdiction it operates, and who controls access. Cloud sovereignty does not mean isolation. It means autonomy. It means India must host critical AI workloads domestically. It means we build data center ecosystems at scale. It means domestic access to high-performance compute for our startups, academia, defense, healthcare, and manufacturing.”
Adani stated that if intelligence infrastructure is concentrated externally, strategic leverage concentrates externally and external concentration creates national fragility.
He said, “In earlier centuries, nations built navies to secure trade routes. Today, we build sovereign compute to secure intelligence routes.”
On the pillar of services sovereignty for retaining India's AI dividend, he said India's IT revolution made it a global digital services powerhouse. But much of the productivity dividend accrued elsewhere.
The AI revolution gives India a once-in-a-century opportunity to change that equation.
“Our AI must first amplify our Indian productivity… enhance our agricultural resilience, personalize our education at massive scale, optimize our networks of logistics and ports, improve our energy and distribution efficiency, modernize our manufacturing competitiveness, expand our healthcare diagnostics across rural India and deepen our financial inclusion across Tier 2/3 towns and villages,” he said.
AI must become a force multiplier for Indian citizens before it becomes a margin multiplier for others, he said. “This is not protectionism. This is preparedness. This is not isolation. This is strategic maturity.”
Recalling Adani group's previous announcement of investing $100 billion to build a sovereign, green-energy-powered AI infrastructure platform, he said the data center expansion will trigger a 5-gigawatt, $250 billion integrated energy-and-compute ecosystem engineered to anchor India’s Intelligence Revolution.
“By integrating renewable energy, grid resilience, and hyperscale compute into a unified architecture, this commitment ensures that India's AI future is not only powered but secured, sovereign, and built at a national scale,” he said.
