Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said focus is now on ensuring a robust talent pool and getting infrastructure in place as leading tech companies find promising market, workforce, and billions flow in investment for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India.
Speaking at Rising Bharat Summit 2026, Vaishnaw said India has the “highest diffusion rate” of new technologies among comparable economies, with the IT sector rapidly pivoting towards AI-led services.
The Information and Broadcasting Minister further remarked that the strength of the Indian IT sector has always been its capabilities to adapt to changing tech landscape as shown in the Y2K problem and the advent of cloud, among others.
“This is now the transition where we are shifting from coding to automatic coding but using an architecture which is designed by the IT companies out there,” he said, emphasising that IT companies will have a significantly bigger role to play, especially as trust becomes a key factor in AI transition.
“Any enterprise would like to have people who can be trusted with their data, internal architecture, and business model,” he explained.
Vaishvaw also emphasised that the next phase of growth will depend on how quickly India can produce skilled talent, calling on states such as Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu to reorient college curricula to meet industry needs, with support from the Centre.
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The minister also underlined the need to significantly scale up infrastructure and compute capacity. India has already added around 38,000 GPUs, but will need to expand this to at least 200,000 GPUs to meet rising demand. The push comes amid investment commitments of over $250 billion in AI and an additional $17 billion earmarked for deep-tech startups.
He also welcomed the tax holiday given to AI firms using India-based data centres till 2047 FM Nirmala Sitharaman announced in Union Budget, calling it a critical step to attract investments and support India’s AI infrastructure build-out.
First Published: Feb 27, 2026 2:41 PM IST
