India 8th among 11 countries in investment in AI: WEF white paper

US, Singapore, S Korea and China are the top four, it says

India was ranked eighth among 11 countries based on their historical accumulated investments in the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem between 2010 and 2024, which were converted as a percentage of their respective gross domestic products (GDPs) for 2024. The US and Singapore took the top honours.

 

A white paper — “Rethinking AI Sovereignty” — released by World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos a few days ago in collaboration with Bain & Co, says that India’s accumulated investments since 2010 accounted for 1.2-1.8 per cent of its 2024 GDP, compared to the US at 3.4-5.1 per cent, Singapore at 3.1-4.6 per cent, South Korea at 2.2-3.3 per cent, and China at 1.7-2.6 per cent at fourth position. 

Countries or regions which performed lower than India include Europe (excluding the UK) at 1.1-1.6 per cent, and Brazil at 0.7-1.1 per cent. Countries above India include the UAE, Japan, Canada, and the UK. While the rest of the world collectively was nearly on a par with India, a bulk of the investments was in hardware, driven by just two companies — TSMC and UMC. 

But the white paper clearly brings to the fore the fact that AI is a big bucks game that mega investments, even though there is no road map of adequate return on investments in the near future. Two countries, the US and China, are of course making big over-sized bets — they account for 65 per cent of the total AI investment since 2010, totalling a staggering $2,150 billion to $3,250 billion. Both the countries have taken a full-stack approach. And the report says that the projected additional investment annually till 2030 would be to the tune of $1.5 trillion.

 

One of the largest investments is going into building the AI infrastructure (data centres) where the cumulative investment since 2010 has already hit $600 billion. The report estimates that the globe currently has over 1,136 hyperscalers, and the projection is that that number would go up to over 2,000 by 2030. India, for example, itself has investments of over $67 billion, which will be on board in the country in the next three years. These investments were announced by global big tech companies.

 

In hardware, investment of over $200 billion has already been made since 2010. This investment is expected to grow by 15-25 per cent annually, or $90 billion per annum, until 2030 as more high-end processors are required to power AI. And investment in foundational models, the report says, is projected to grow 25-35 per cent per annum, reaching at least $300 billion per year until 2030, driven by the complexity of large language models, small language models, and classical machine learning.