Artificial intelligence (AI) is going to redefine sovereignty, hence India should build its own critical AI infrastructure instead of relying on infrastructure abroad, Adani Group Executive Director and Gautam Adani’s son Jeet Adani said on Thursday.
The $100-billion AI infrastructure investment announced earlier this week by the Ports-to-Renewables Conglomerate will ensure India’s AI future is “secure, sovereign and nationally built,” he asserted.
Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit, Adani highlighted three pillars of sovereignty that he believes “will define India’s AI century”—energy sovereignty, compute and cloud sovereignty, and services sovereignty.
“In earlier centuries, countries built steel mills and shipyards. In the digital age, countries have invested in semiconductor ecosystems. In today’s AI era, sovereign computing capacity has become strategic infrastructure. It matters where the compute is, under whose jurisdiction it operates. This does not mean cloud control. Autonomy,” said Adani.
India should host critical AI workloads domestically, build data center ecosystems at scale and ensure access to domestic high-performance computing for the country’s startups, academia, defense, healthcare and manufacturing sectors, he stressed.
“If the intelligence infrastructure is concentrated externally, strategic leverage is concentrated externally. And external concentration creates national vulnerability. In earlier centuries, nations built navies to secure trade routes. Today we must create a sovereign calculation to secure intelligence routes,” he said.
Adani emphasized that energy sovereignty translates into “intelligence sovereignty”, adding that in today’s AI era, power grids and data grids have become inseparable, and India must move forward with renewable energy expansion.
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“AI is written in code. But it runs on electricity… If a country’s energy systems are fragile, its intelligence systems are weak… India’s renewable expansion across solar, wind, storage is not just a climate policy, it is a strategic infrastructure policy,” Adani said. “So, what will be different in India because of this? Renewable clusters will co-locate with AI data centers. Industrial corridors will integrate energy and compute planning. Storage and grid stability will become national priorities.”
On services sovereignty in the AI era, Adani noted that India’s information technology revolution has made it a global services powerhouse, with other countries capturing much of the productivity dividend, and argued that the AI revolution offers a “once-in-a-century opportunity” to change this.
He insisted that AI should act as a “force multiplier” for Indian citizens before it becomes a “margin multiplier” for others.
“Our AI must first enhance our Indian productivity – improve our agricultural resilience, massively personalize our education, optimize our logistics and ports networks, improve our energy and distribution efficiency, improve our manufacturing competitiveness, modernize our manufacturing competitiveness, expand our healthcare analytics across rural India.
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Talking about Adani Group’s recently announced $100-billion investment to build a sovereign, green-energy-based AI infrastructure platform, he said it was not just a data center expansion, but a 5-gigawatt and $250-billion integrated energy and compute trigger to revolutionize India’s ecosystem.
“By integrating renewable energy, grid resiliency and hyperscale compute into a unified architecture, this commitment will ensure that India’s AI future not only powers but is also secure, sovereign and nationally built,” Adani said.
