Giant Indian industrial conglomerate Adani has said it will spend up to $100 billion on AI datacenters to equip the nation with sovereign infrastructure, but will do so at slower pace than Big Tech tech companies plan to bring their own bit barns to Bharat.
The organization yesterday announced its plan to spend the cash on 5 GW worth of “renewable-energy-powered, hyperscale AI-ready datacenters” and gave itself the deadline of the year 2035 to get it done.
Labor is cheap in India, so $100 billion can go a long way. But $100 billion over nine years is a modest and slow plan compared to the $635 billion Amazon, Google, Meta, say they’ll spend on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone. AWS, Google and Microsoft have also promised to spend $67 billion on AI infrastructure in India over the next few years.
Despite not yet having secured land for the facilities, Adani says they will “be optimised for large high-density compute clusters and next-generation AI workloads, supported by advanced liquid cooling systems and high-efficiency power architecture.”
The company expects the datacenters will host compute capacity dedicated to Indian-language LLMs and “national data initiatives.”
Adani made its announcement on the same day as India’s government staged an “AI Impact Summit” at which prime minister Narendra Modi declared “AI stands at a civilizational inflection point. It can expand human capability in unprecedented ways, but it can also test existing social foundations if left unguided.”
“India should be among the top three AI superpowers globally, not just in the consumption of AI but in creation,” the PM added, offering a vision of enthusiastic global adoption of made-in-India AI models, Indian AI startups scoring stratospheric valuations, and India’s citizens seeing AI as “an enabler of opportunity, a multiplier of capability, and a servant of human dignity, not as a threat to their livelihood or an instrument of control.”
He also pitched AI as a problem-solver, not another tool Big Tech uses to gain dominance of India’s market.
To illustrate that approach, Minister of Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw pointed to India’s National AI Mission, which operates a collection of 38,000 GPUs it rents to local companies for ₹65 ($0.72) an hour. The minister used the Summit to announce a plan to add another 20,000 GPUs to the system.
Nvidia claims it will provide some of the hardware and also pointed to its partnerships with other Indian cloud operators to build AI factories.
Adani will therefore face some local competition quite soon, while also having to wait for Big Tech’s billions to land in India. ®