India’s expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is set to enhance regional AI capabilities without diverting investments from established Southeast Asian centers like Singapore and Malaysia, industry experts revealed at the Gitex AI Asia 2026 conference in Singapore. The country’s significant scale is expected to serve as a testing ground for the wider Asian market, aiding other regions in achieving “scale and velocity.” Gorilla Technology’s Chairman and CEO, Jay Chandan, dismissed concerns of India replacing Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam, emphasizing India’s goal to showcase that emerging economies can develop large-scale models efficiently and successfully.
Yotta Data Services Co-founder and Chief Executive, Sunil Gupta, highlighted India’s geopolitical stability, positioning it to potentially become a key hub for meeting global AI demands. He noted that India’s extensive data centers address global supply chain issues, attracting more European and Middle Eastern enterprises to utilize India for hosting their AI training and inference workloads due to GPU shortages elsewhere. With a population of 1.4 billion, including a billion internet-connected smartphone users, India currently leads the world in digital payment transactions, driving a surge in demand for data processing and storage within the country.
The report underscored the increasing concerns among Indian users regarding privacy and security related to their data, coinciding with the growing adoption of AI in recent years. Gupta emphasized the rising preference for sovereign AI and models trained on local data, describing it as a significant trend in India, strongly supported by the government. The government’s IndiaAI Mission, which substantially subsidizes computing expenses, plays a crucial role by incentivizing infrastructure providers to allocate GPUs to local model developers, researchers, and academia.
