Adani Pitches AI Sovereignty, $100Bn Push for Energy, Data Infra

 New Delhi: Betting big on artificial intelligence or AI in India, billionaire Gautam Adani on Monday said that energy security and digital infrastructure would define geopolitical power in the coming decades. He also urged India to build its own artificial intelligence capabilities. “India must own its intelligence future, not rent it,” he said at the CII’s Business Summit 2026 here.

Referring to recent geopolitical conflicts and attacks on infrastructure, Adani also said energy security and digital security are now the twin pillars of national power. “The country that controls its energy will power its industrial future. The country that controls its compute will power its intelligence future. And the country that controls both will shape the century ahead,” he said while addressing the summit.

Adani also said that the assumptions underpinning decades of globalisation were being dismantled amid rising geopolitical fragmentation. “The world that is emerging is not flat. It is fractured and contested. Semiconductors have become instruments of statecraft. Data is being treated as a national resource. Clouds are being weaponised and and artificial intelligence is being built behind the protective walls of data centres,” he said.

Focussing on AI the most, he said India should treat AI not merely as software, but as strategic infrastructure spanning energy, data centres, chips, networks, compute and talent. “India must not rent the infrastructure of its future intelligence. India must build it, power it and own it on its own soil. India's traditional IT outsourcing model would need to evolve in the AI era. The old IT model wrote code for the world. The new model must build intelligence and can afford to be largely sovereign,” he said.

Outlining a three-layer AI framework consisting of power generation, compute infrastructure and AI applications, he said that sovereign ownership of data and compute infrastructure would become critical in the next phase of technological competition. “If our data is processed on distant shores, it means our future is being written on foreign shores,” he said.

The industrialist also said that India’s scale of domestic demand across manufacturing, mobility, logistics and digital services positioned it uniquely to build large-scale AI and energy infrastructure with demand "already embedded into the economy. “India had crossed 500 gigawatts of installed power capacity and said the country's future AI economy would require massive investment in energy and compute ecosystems,” he said.

Adani, however, rejected the fact that AI will cut jobs in India; rather it will empower the businesses and create jobs in the country. “India must build AI not as a force that removes opportunity, but as one that expands productivity, creates jobs, empowers entrepreneurs and gives Indians the tools to compete globally,” Adani said.

He reiterated his ports-to-energy conglomerate's previously announced $100 billion commitment towards energy transition and digital infrastructure, including the 30-GW renewable energy project at Khavda in Gujarat and partnerships with Google and Microsoft in India's data centre and sovereign compute ecosystem.

Reflecting on the group's growth, Adani said that he had spent decades building from ports where there were only marshlands to power projects in regions that knew only darkness. “The future does not arrive. It is built. The next freedom struggle would be fought in our grids, our data centres, our factories, our classrooms, our laboratories and our minds, and that freedom in the AI era would mean the capability to power ourselves, compute for ourselves and dream for ourselves,” he said.

Drawing parallels with India’s digital payments revolution, Adani said the launch of UPI had enabled the emergence of companies such as Flipkart, Paytm, Ola, Swiggy, Meesho, Zepto, and PhonePe by making millions of Indians digitally visible and financially connected. “AI will do the same but at a far greater scale,” he said.