A week before the Indian government hosts the largest gathering of AI enablers in the world, Abhishek Singh, CEO, IndiaAI Mission of MeitY, outlined the state of AI in India at the moment and key objectives of the IndiaAI Impact Summit (Feb 16-20).
In an interview with NIC MeitY, Abhishek Singh explained how India plans to build the infrastructure, workforce and policy frameworks needed to compete in the global AI race – while ensuring the technology remains accessible and safe.
India’s AI ambitions are increasingly being defined not just by models and startups, but something far more fundamental, according to Abhishek Singh of IndiaAI Mission. It begins with compute infrastructure needed to run AI models and applications hosted within India, skilling initiatives needed to train and prepare this future-ready AI workforce, and effective guardrails to regulate AI on the cutting-edge.
India currently ranks among the top three countries globally in AI readiness, but the gap with the leaders remains significant. As Singh noted, “we’re currently ranked number three, according to Stanford AI Index Report 2025… but the gap between India and China and the US is much bigger.”
Bridging that gap starts with compute that enable and powers AI models and applications in the cloud, across public-private enterprise. GPUs – the backbone of modern AI – remain expensive and limited in supply. Singh revealed that “we currently have almost 40,000 GPUs set up in India at a heavily subsidized low cost of just one dollar per GPU per hour, but this needs to increase a lot more.”
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For a country of India’s scale, that number is only a starting point. “For a country of our size and scale, 40,000 GPUs just isn’t enough,” he said, pointing out that individual global companies already operate GPU farms with “half a million, 500,000, 600,000 GPUs.”
Just to give you some context here, for the GPT-5 release, OpenAI reportedly utilized around 200,000 GPUs, though exact GPU numbers across all clusters remain undisclosed. Anthropic has nearly 500,000 AWS Trainium2 chips via Project Rainier (GPU-equivalent for AI workloads) and another 1 million Google TPUs for over 1-GW capacity online in 2026, with plans to add another million GPUs (from NVIDIA and other vendors).
To close this GPU cluster gap, India is investing across the stack – from datacentres and computing infrastructure to datasets and foundational models, according to Abhishek Singh of IndiaAI Mission. “We’re trying to take the necessary steps to bridge the existing gap and maybe catch up with the best. And if possible, let India lead in the field of AI,” he emphasized.
Alongside infrastructure, the workforce transformation driven by AI is already underway. On the topic of the future of jobs, Singh believes AI will reshape jobs rather than simply eliminate them.
“AI will create some new jobs, improve others, and increase opportunities,” he said, adding further that one of the biggest growth areas will be integrating AI into existing enterprise systems. “Today ‘agentic AI’ has become a common term,” he explained, referring to systems that can autonomously handle tasks across legacy IT environments.
As organisations adopt these systems, new roles will emerge, believes Singh. “Forward deployment engineers – a new term for engineers who implement AI nowadays – these jobs will increase,” Singh said.
At the same time, routine coding and implementation work may face disruption. “Some jobs will be negatively affected, especially routine coding jobs… AI might actually do a better job.”
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However, he emphasised that opportunities will expand across robotics, data science, and AI integration. “We’ll have to invest in training people in these skills so they can take advantage of the jobs that are going to be created.”
In all of this, teaching AI early to the younger generations will be key for India’s future. Preparing India’s future workforce begins in schools. AI is already being introduced into curricula at multiple levels.
According to Singh, “CBSE is introducing AI as a subject. AI and data analysis, data science are being introduced as topics that students should learn from a very early stage.” Exposure could begin even earlier. “From class five onwards,” he said, adding that “ideally, it should start as early as possible.”
The aim is to treat AI literacy like basic scientific literacy, so as to ensure students in India grow up understanding the technologies shaping their world more intimately.
Needless to say, with rapid adoption comes the need for safeguards. On this topic, Abhishek Singh of IndiaAI Mission described AI as a technology with both promise and risk. “It’s a technology with a dual use – it can be used for good or it can be used to cause harm.”
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He further pointed out how India’s approach focuses on encouraging innovation while preventing misuse. “We encourage innovation but restrict user harm,” he said, particularly in areas such as deepfakes, cybercrime and harmful content.
One key step in this regard is transparency. “We’ve come up with rules that require labeling all AI-generated content,” Singh explained, so users can identify whether what they see is real or synthetic.
With the much awaited India AI Impact Summit just days away, Abhishek Singh of IndiaAI Mission made sure that India’s strategy is clear. It’s all about building the local compute, training the workforce early, and putting guardrails in place – so the country can scale AI responsibly while remaining competitive on the global stage.
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