New Delhi

Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit, Jeet Adani, Director, Adani Digital Labs on Thursday focused on three defining pillars for India's AI century: energy sovereignty; compute and cloud sovereignty; and services sovereignty.

Referring to history, Jeet Adani said electricity powered industry, oil reshaped geopolitics, and internet transformed commerce while today AI is going to redefine sovereignty.

"The central question before our country, India, is not whether we will adopt AI. The questions are, will India import intelligence or architect it? Will we consume productivity or create it? Will we plug into someone else's system or build it itself? The time for asking these is now over. As my country, India, rises, she does not rise to dominate. She rises to stabilize. She rises to anchor a world searching for balance. And she rises to build systems that are inclusive and enduring," he added.

Jeet Adani highlighted that India builds technology not for exclusion or control, but for inclusion.

"In this geopolitically charged century, I believe that inclusion without capability is weakness, and capability without sovereignty is foreign dependence. The first pillar, energy, is actually intelligence sovereignty. AI is written in code, but it runs on electricity. As we all know, under peak load, advanced processors generate extraordinary heat. Systems throttle when power falters and performance drops. This is not just an engineering detail, it is the strategic truth," he explained. "If a nation's energy systems are fragile, its intelligence systems are fragile. In today's AI era, power grids and data grids have become inseparable. This means that India's renewable expansion across solar, wind, and storage is no longer just climate policy. It is strategic infrastructure policy. And energy security is going to be equivalent to intelligence security."

Adani underlined that sustainable energy has become India's competitive advantage.

"We see that renewable clusters will co-locate with AI data centers. Industrial corridors will integrate energy and compute planning. Storage and grid stability will become national priorities. If energy is the fuel, compute is the factory. In earlier centuries, nations built steel plants and shipyards. In the digital age, nations invested in semiconductor ecosystems. And in today's AI age, sovereign compute capacity has become strategic infrastructure. It matters now where compute resides, under whose jurisdiction it operates and who controls this access."

He however emphasised that cloud sovereignty does not mean isolation.

"It means autonomy. It means India must host critical AI workloads domestically. It means we build data center ecosystems at scale. It means domestic access to high performance compute for our startups, academia, defense, healthcare, and manufacturing. If intelligence infrastructure is concentrated externally, strategic leverage concentrates externally," he said.

"In earlier centuries, nations have built navies to secure those important trade routes. Today, we built sovereign compute to secure our intelligence routes," he added.

Jeet Adani said that third pillar for India's AI century is services sovereignty.

"We all know that India's IT revolution made us a global digital services powerhouse. But much of the productivity dividend accrued not in our nation, but elsewhere. The AI revolution gives India a once in a century opportunity to change that equation. Our AI must first amplify our Indian productivity. It must enhance our agriculture resilience. It must personalize our education at a massive scale. It must optimize our networks of logistics and ports. It must improve our energy and distribution efficiency."

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The Director, Adani Digital Labs said AI must become a force multiplier for Indian citizens before it becomes a multiplier for others. "This is not protectionism. This is preparedness. This is not isolation. This is strategic maturity."

He reiterated the Adani Group's plans to invest a USD 100 billion to build a sovereign green energy powered AI infrastructure platform for the nation.