Data centres to subsea cables: India draws mega AI infra bets on Day 3

Day three of the AI Impact Summit underscored India's central role in global AI expansion, with new investments, cross-border partnerships and large-scale infrastructure commitments

Tech majors took centre stage on day three of the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi with their announcements on infrastructure scale-up, cross-border partnerships and capital commitments complementing the Global South narrative. From Microsoft to Nvidia and Google, the message was about AI infrastructure powering India’s growth while positioning the country at the epicenter of the next phase of AI expansion. 

American software major Microsoft on Wednesday reaffirmed its commitment to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and capabilities across countries in the Global South. Mountain View (California)-headquartered Google  announced a new subsea cable route that would increase the AI connectivity between the US, India and multiple locations across the southern hemisphere. Larsen & Toubro and Santa Clara-based Nvidia spoke about building a gigawatt-scale AI factory, signalling ambitions to create one of the largest AI compute backbones in the region. Back home, Yotta Data Services plans to invest an additional $4 billion this year to order another 40,000 graphic processing units from Nvidia. 

Brad Smith, vice-chair and president of Microsoft pointed at the inequality between the Global North and South, while stating that AI can assist in closing the gap, allowing the Global South to catch up on economic growth. “We need to bring the infrastructure that the Global South needs, that means data centres, connectivity, and electricity. That’s why Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO) announced that the company would be spending $17 billion in India. It’s why we’re on pace to spend $50 billion by the end of the decade bringing AI here.”

 

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier in the day, announced at the summit that the India-America Connect initiative would bring in a new sub-sea cable route for better AI connectivity between the US, India and others in the southern hemisphere. 

Pichai also said that besides infrastructure, investments in skilling people should also be a focus area. “Which is why we are announcing one of our most ambitious skilling programmes here. This includes the new Google AI function certificate programme that helps people master AI at work,” he said. In India, Google will be working with Wadhwani AI to reach students early on.

 

Google also announced a new $30 million Goolge.org AI for science impact challenge, “to drive the next generation of scientific breakthroughs.” Google Deepmind is partnering with the Indian government as part of the global national partnership program, he added. This will bring access to frontier AI capabilities.

 

On the plan to build a gigawatt-scale AI factory with L&T, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement that the partnership will lay the foundation for world-class AI infrastructure to power India’s growth and help realise the full vision of India AI. The NVIDIA CEO had cancelled his plan to attend the AI Summit at the last minute citing personal reasons.

 

“AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in human history — everyone will use it, every company will be powered by it and every country will build it. Prime Minister Modi has outlined a bold vision to democratise AI access across the Global South and position India as a global hub for digital infrastructure,” Huang said.

 

The venture is expected to scale up NVIDIA GPU cluster deployment at its Chennai data center as well as in Mumbai—currently under execution.

 

The AI factory model will be able to deliver advanced AI services to global off takers, hyperscalers and India Inc, including manufacturing, infrastructure, energy, financial services, healthcare and public services, thereby moving from experimentation to production-scale deployment. It is designed to provide standardised, enterprise-grade AI capabilities, enabling predictable performance, security and time-to value for industrial and services use cases. 

Synthesising...

• Microsoft to invest $50 bn by decade’s end to expand AI access across the Global South
• Yotta Data Services announces $2 bn investment in Nvidia chips; to deploy 20,736 liquid-cooled Blackwell Ultra GPUs at an AI hub by August
• L&T to form a JV with Nvidia to build sovereign, gigawatt-scale AI factory
• Google announces India-US subsea cable routes, plus skilling programmes for 20 mn public servants and 11 mn students
• OpenAI  partners with IT Delhi, IIM Ahmedabad, and others to develop AI-ready talent
• Qualcomm commits up to $150 mn for a Strategic AI Venture Fund in India