Ashwini Vaishnaw Reveals Modi Government's Plan to Take on US, China in AI Game

Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw went all out at the Republic Plenary Summit to discuss India’s mega plan to position itself as a leader in the AI landscape. Talking to Republic TV’s Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami , Vaishnaw revealed the Modi government’s grand plan to take on the US and China, which are currently engaged in a neck-and-neck war to show AI dominance.

“We are very well placed to be in the AI race,” said Vaishnaw on stage at the event held at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. “This is the new industrial revolution. AI has brought in such capabilities, which are going to fundamentally change our society, fundamentally change our economy. So, we, as a country, have a very strong software strength. And, [we are] now building up the hardware strength. So, we are so well placed that we can really take leadership in this field.”

India’s efforts to maximise the use of its resources, including the AI think tank, leapt with PM Modi’s IndiaAI Mission last year. As part of the initiative, the government seeks to foster strong relationships between public and private entities to collaborate in the direction of indigenous AI development. The efforts, the government says, are important as the US and China escalate their investments into expanding their AI ecosystems.

On one hand, the US has OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has emerged as the industry leader. But, on the other hand, a small startup from China, DeepSeek, showed the world that functional consumer-facing AI services do not have to cost billions of dollars. According to Vaishnaw, India’s AI capabilities will come through the same way as the Chandrayaan-3.

What does the roadmap look like?

“Our Prime Minister has given us the thought that we must democratise technology. We have taken that as the path where to begin with, we are creating a common compute facility,” said Vaishnaw, underscoring the launch of the new AI Compute platform that will allow participating companies, startups, and researchers to use high-end and mid-range GPUs to build their foundational models. The government is rolling out 10,000 GPUs initially, including models such as Nvidia’s H100, H200, A100, L40S, and L4; AMD’s MI300x and 325x; Intel’s Gaudi 2; and AWS’s Tranium and Inferentia.

“Second, we are developing our own foundational models,” he added, pointing out the development of indigenous models based on the newly announced AIKosha repository. This secure digital platform is “a series of data sets of non-personal data, which can then be used to train models without bias on using our diversity, our Indic languages so that we get something that we really need. And that will become the big, big, big force, which will help our industry, our researchers, our startups to develop solutions for our needs.”

“Third, we are developing a series of applications,” Vaishnaw added, “which can be used to solve population-scale problems.” The fourth cornerstone of the government’s efforts is the talent pool. “We are creating a very good talent pipeline.”

Where does India stand?

India may be behind the US and China, but it is not too far behind — at least, according to Vaishnaw. “We are already ranked number one by Stanford University, number one in the world on AI talent. We want to strengthen that, continue that.”

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