New Delhi: India has to significantly raise its investment in Artificial Intelligence beyond the current USD 1.2 billion if it wants to compete at a global scale, a senior NVIDIA executive noted on Wednesday, highlighting the Union Budget’s 20-year tax holiday for foreign companies as a crucial enabler in terms of AI infrastructure growth.
Shanker Trivedi, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Business at NVIDIA, spoke during the AI Impact Summit 2026 and noted that 2,000 global corporations, close to 1,800 operate major Global Capability Centre (GCCs) in India. These centres at present employ about 2 million professionals and is pected to rise to 3 million quite soon.
According to Trivedi, each of these GCCs will need its own “AI factory” to transform proprietary data, intellectual property and business processes into intelligent systems. He called the Budget announcement a big structural opportunity, calling it “foundational infrastructure” for India’s AI goals.
How Union Budget 2026-27 boosts AI investment?
In the Union Budget 2026-27, the government brought a 20-year tax holiday, valid until 2047, for foreign firms using data centre services in India. The move addresses concerns over taxation of global income and ensures equality in tax treatment, whether companies establish their own data centres locally or rely on Indian service providers. The policy is targeted at creating a level playing field while also encouraging large-scale digital structure investment as well.
Trivedi accepted that India’s USD 1.2-billion AI infrastructure allocation is a good start and is being effectively deployed. Still, he pointed out that there was a gap compared to India’s broader infrastructure spending, which stands at roughly USD 150 billion annually across sectors like power, logistics, transport and the lot.
In order to build population-scale AI capabilities and place India as a global hub for manufacturing and services powered by AI, Trivedi felt that funding has increased on a huge scale. As the economy expands. He expressed hope that AI infrastructure spending will also surge forward.
NVIDIA, which has a dominant share in the global GPU market, chips that power AI development due to their high-speed processing capabilities, is still central to the AI ecosystem.
Back in March 2024, the Union Cabinet led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved the IndiaAI Mission with a budget marking of Rs 10,371.92 crore. The initiative sought to develop a robust AI ecosystem through coordinated efforts between government bodies and private enterprises.