Gautam AdaniImage Credit source: PTI
Industrialist Gautam Adani called on India to develop indigenous capabilities in artificial intelligence value chain and said on Monday that energy security and digital infrastructure will define geopolitical power in the coming decades. Addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Annual Business Summit 2026, the Adani Group Chairman said that the decades-old foundations of globalization are weakening amid increasing geopolitical fragmentation. He said that the emerging world is not stable, but divided and competitive. Semiconductors have now become instruments of governance. Data is being seen as a national resource. Cloud is being used as a weapon. Artificial Intelligence is being developed within the security walls of data centers.
AI is not just software
Referring to recent geopolitical conflicts and attacks on infra, he said that energy security and digital security are now two major pillars of national power. Adani said India should look at AI not just as software but as a strategic infrastructure spanning energy, data centres, chips, networks, compute capacity and talent. He said that India should not rent the infrastructure of its intellectual future. India should build, operate and own it in its own country. Adani said India has a unique opportunity to build large scale energy and AI infrastructure due to the massive domestic demand in manufacturing, transportation, logistics and digital services. He said that India has crossed the 500 GW installed power capacity mark and the future AI economy will require huge investment in energy and compute infrastructure.
AI will not eliminate employment
Adani said that AI is not just software. AI is infra. AI is energy. AI is cooling. There is an AI chip. AI is network. AI is data. AI is genius. AI is governance. He rejected the notion that AI would eliminate employment on a large scale. The Adani Group chairman said India should use AI to increase productivity, create new jobs, empower small businesses and enable Indians to compete globally. Giving the example of digital payment revolution, he said that millions of Indians got digitally connected through UPI. As a result, companies like Flipkart, Paytm, Ola, Swiggy, Meesho, Zepto and PhonePe emerged. He said that AI will work on an even wider scale than this. Describing a three-tier framework for AI comprising energy production, compute infrastructure and applications, Adani said that indigenous ownership of data and compute infrastructure will be very important in the times to come.
Adani’s renewable energy project
He said that if our data is processed abroad, it means that our future is also being written abroad. Adani said the group has already commissioned 35 per cent of the 30 GW renewable energy project in Khavra, Gujarat, which he described as the world’s largest single-site renewable energy plant. He said that the group’s total commitment for energy transition and digital infra is $100 billion. It also reiterated plans to invest $100 billion in the data center business, which includes a partnership with Google to build a large data center complex in Visakhapatnam. Adani said that companies like Microsoft, Flipkart and Uber are also collaborating with the group in data infrastructure projects. In the end he said that the real measure of AI will not be how many jobs it eliminates, but how many Indians it empowers.
