India belongs to 1st group of AI nations, remains biggest supplier of services: Ashwini Vaishnaw Davos

January 21, 2026

New Delhi: Union Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav has stated that India is clearly among the first group of leading AI nations, as the country is actively working on all five levels of AI architecture—applications, models, chips, infrastructure, and energy. He outlined India’s artificial intelligence strategy during a panel discussion during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos.

AI success will be determined by return on investment, not large models

The minister said that the real benefits of AI come from enterprise-level deployment and increased productivity, not just from developing extremely large models. He explained that approximately 95 percent of AI use cases can be met with models with 20–50 billion parameters, which India is already developing and implementing in various sectors.

Affordable and accessible AI compute facilities through public-private partnerships

Citing GPU availability as a major challenge, Vaishnav said that India has incorporated approximately 38,000 GPUs as part of the National Compute Facility under a public-private partnership model. This government-supported and subsidized system provides computing capacity to students, researchers, startups, and innovators at approximately one-third the global cost.