US wants India to build on American AI stack: White House advisor

On the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit, White House AI advisor Sriram Krishnan said India is a key US ally and Washington wants partners to build on American AI infrastructure

Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence (AI) Sriram Krishnan on Wednesday said that the United States (US) wants to make sure that the world uses the American AI stack.

 

Speaking at a special session on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Krishnan said that India is an important ally of the US, and that the latter wants all its allies to leverage and build on top of the US’ AI infrastructure.

 

“This does not mean giving up strategic autonomy. Indian companies will need to bring in local language support and local culture, and it needs to have local inference for low latency, built on infrastructure here. But at the end of the day, we want the American AI stack to be something that everyone builds on,” Krishnan said.

 

He pointed out that all the leading AI modelling companies are in the US and that the country has been investing heavily in AI. “…our pitch is that we want to be the best partner when it comes to AI,” he said, adding that India should use this AI and investment leverage to build the services and tools that can be useful for its citizens. 

 

Speaking about the US’ AI Action Plan, Krishnan said that America and its allies have a role in embracing AI and should have the optimism that it can be useful in daily lives.

 

He said the plan is built around expanding infrastructure and accelerating innovation. AI requires significant energy capacity and data centres to power graphics processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs), and the US aims to enable faster development of such infrastructure, including grids, gas turbines, and nuclear power, he added.

 

“The second pillar is we want innovation. We want to make sure we unlock the Geminis of the world, the OpenAIs of the world, the Groks of the world, the Anthropics of the world,” Krishnan said.

 

The White House official’s comments come amid growing investments by major US-based AI firms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Microsoft, which are expanding their presence in India to tap growth opportunities in the world’s most populous country.