India is behind on cloud. That is the received wisdom repeated by consultants, hyperscalers and technology evangelists at every industry forum. But spend an hour listening to the people actually building and advising on India’s AI infrastructure, and a more complicated, more interesting picture emerges. One in which India’s so-called backfoot might, if played correctly, turn out to be an advantage.
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At the SYMX.AI Industrial AI Summit 2026 in Mumbai, Vivek Mathur, Partner at Deloitte India, dropped a number that reframes the conversation. “Cloud penetration collectively will not be more than 15%,” he said. “80% of the world is still sitting on compromised data centers whether it is their own or third parties. That’s the reality of where India is today.”
The instinct is to read that as a problem. The hyperscalers certainly do. So do the consultants advising cloud migration, an industry with an obvious financial interest in India moving its infrastructure off-premise and onto someone else’s servers. But look at it differently, and 85% on-premise is not a liability. It is optionality.
India has been here before. In the 1990s, the country never built landlines at the scale the West did. At the time, that looked like infrastructure failure. It turned out to be the setup for one of the most dramatic technology leapfrogs in history – straight to mobile, bypassing a generation of copper wire and everything that came with it. The question now is whether India can do it again. Not from landline to mobile, but from on-premise to edge, skipping the centralised cloud phase that the West already has a lock on.
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The signals are there. Ash Agarwal, CEO of SYMX.AI and moderator of the panel, noted that the decentralisation trend is already visible globally. “Perplexity has launched a new Mac Mini that can run on your computer itself. Nothing leaves your house. Everything stays there.” Consumer AI products that run entirely on-device, never touching a data center, are arriving now. India’s enterprises haven’t registered the implications yet. The infrastructure argument for edge is also sound. Yogesh Sahu of Jio Platform described exactly this kind of deployment in their work with the government’s land resources department. “They have huge data they are capturing from terrestrial earth and they are facing difficulty to transfer their data to the central cloud. We are setting up edge computing closer to where they are capturing data, they can process it there and they can transfer only the intelligence.” That is not a workaround. That is the architecture of what comes after the cloud.
None of this means India should ignore the cloud entirely. Mathur is right that for most organisations, offloading infrastructure to a specialist makes commercial sense. But the window to make a different, bolder choice is open right now, precisely because India hasn’t over-committed yet.
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Vyom Ramani
A journalist with a soft spot for tech, games, and things that go beep. While waiting for a delayed metro or rebooting his brain, you’ll find him solving Rubik’s Cubes, bingeing F1, or hunting for the next great snack. View Full Profile
