Jeet Adani, director of Adani Airports Holdings Ltd., on Thursday pitched artificial intelligence as the defining force of India’s next economic era, urging the country to build its own “sovereign” AI infrastructure instead of depending on foreign systems.
Speaking at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, the Adani Group leader said the global race around AI is no longer only about adopting new technology, but about controlling the foundations on which intelligence will run in the future. “The question is not whether India will adopt AI,” he said, but whether the country will “import intelligence or architect it.”
Adani framed AI as a shift comparable to electricity powering industry or the internet transforming commerce, arguing that AI will now “redefine sovereignty” itself.
In his address titled India’s Intelligence Century: Sovereignty, Scale and National Renewal, Adani outlined three pillars that he believes will determine India’s ability to compete in the AI age — energy, compute, and services sovereignty. The first pillar, he said, is energy sovereignty, noting that AI systems may be written in code but ultimately run on electricity. Advanced processors generate enormous heat and require stable power grids to function efficiently.
“If a nation’s energy systems are fragile, its intelligence systems are fragile,” he warned, calling renewable energy expansion not just climate policy but “strategic infrastructure policy.” He suggested that in the coming years, renewable clusters could increasingly be co-located with AI data centres, while storage and grid stability would become national priorities.
The second pillar, Adani said, is compute and cloud sovereignty. He compared sovereign compute capacity to the steel plants, shipyards and semiconductor ecosystems that defined earlier industrial revolutions. “It matters where compute resides, under whose jurisdiction it operates, and who controls access,” he said, arguing that India must host critical AI workloads domestically to avoid strategic vulnerability.
The third pillar, he said, is services sovereignty, ensuring that India retains the productivity gains of the AI revolution within the country rather than exporting them abroad. He stressed that AI must first amplify Indian priorities — from agricultural resilience and education to logistics, manufacturing competitiveness, healthcare diagnostics and financial inclusion across smaller towns and rural regions.
Adani Group’s $100 billion AI Infrastructure Push His remarks came days after Gautam Adani announced that the Adani Group would invest $100 billion to build a sovereign, green-energy-powered AI infrastructure platform for India.
He described the plan as more than a data centre expansion, calling it the trigger for a 5-gigawatt, $250 billion integrated energy-and-compute ecosystem aimed at anchoring India’s intelligence revolution.
By combining renewable power, grid resilience and hyperscale compute, he said the commitment would ensure India’s AI future is “powered, secured, sovereign, and built at national scale.”
Closing his speech, Adani positioned AI development as part of modern nationalism, saying India’s responsibility is no longer about winning freedom but strengthening and defending it through capability and resilience. “The question is whether the AI century will carry India’s imprint,” he said, adding that India’s rise must remain inclusive and stabilising rather than dominating.
Also Read: AI Summit Plagued By Chaos And Confusion https://www.vibesofindia.com/ai-summit-plagued-by-chaos-and-confusion/
