 "artificial intelligence, AI")
With India surpassing the $20-billion mark in cumulative and new investment commitments in artificial intelligence (AI) till date in 2025 — according to the latest estimates by the ministry of electronics and information technology (IT) — the country is well poised to become a key player in the race for a place in global AI sweepstakes.
Stanford AI Index Report in 2025 said India’s cumulative private investment in AI from 2013 to 2024 was at $11.1 billion in 2024 (adding the government’s, it is $12.3 billion).
In terms of private sector investments, India is close to those made in Canada and Israel (around $15 billion) and better than France ($11 billion), South Korea ($8.96 billion), and Japan ($5. 9 billion) as well as Australia ($3.88 billion).
India’s investment in AI has been boosted by Google’s new announcement of setting up a $15-billion AI data hub in Visakhapatnam over a period of five years. It would be the largest investment by the company outside of the US.
And, there are a slew of other big announcements which have been made.
TCS plans to invest $5-7 billion to set up AI data centres in the next seven years and Reliance has mega plans in the space but has not disclosed numbers.
AWS has also announced plans to invest $12.7 billion in India to be completed by 2030 to build Cloud infrastructure.
It includes data centres and AI-ready computing resources. And, there is Microsoft, which has pledged $3 billion.
If all these projects take off, investment in AI could easily double.
That apart, private equity investments in AI startups till October 2025 have surpassed $5.3 billion in which generative AI has contributed $2.37 billion, according to Tracxn data.
The government, however, has earmarked $1.2 billion to support the private sector to build the AI graphics processing unit (GPU) infrastructure as well as support LLM companies, and many of the projects are already on the ground.
From the global perspective, many countries like India have put together a clear plan to become big players in the AI game.
The US is way ahead and tops the charts, according to Stanford data with total cumulative investments by the private sector of the US at $471 billion. The US government and private-public initiatives total another $175 billion.
In China, cumulative private investment is to the tune of $119 billion, supported by government funding of around $57.8 billion.
And, even Saudi Arabia has joined the party with the government promising to fund $100 billion to become the Middle East AI hub.
