AI Summit: Vaishnaw counters ‘AI optics’ charge, pitches India's five-layer stack

New Delhi: Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Wednesday laid out India’s AI push at the India AI Impact Summit, framing it as a five-layer “AI stack” spanning applications, models, compute, infrastructure and energy.

Vaishnaw described the event as the first AI summit in the Global South and said it has participation from 118 countries. 

Calling AI a “foundational technology”, he said it is already changing how people work, learn and make decisions.

He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s approach is to “democratise technology”, deploy it at scale and make it accessible, so that its benefits reach the masses.

Vaishnaw said the first layer is the application layer and argued that this is where returns will come from and where AI can deliver direct public benefit. 

He said India is building real-world solutions across sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, education, logistics, design and financial services.

The second layer, he said, is the model layer, which he linked to sovereignty. While large frontier models will continue to push capability, Vaishnaw said India believes more than 90 per cent of use-cases can be addressed with smaller, focused models that deliver specific outcomes at lower cost.

He said India has launched a “bouquet” of sovereign models, many during the summit, with a focus on multilingual and multimodal capabilities. He said these models have performed against frontier models on points that matter for India.

On the compute layer, Vaishnaw said India is treating compute as a public good. He said a public-private common compute platform has been created to provide access to 38,000 GPUs at affordable rates for startups, researchers, academia and students. He added that another 20,000 GPUs will be added.

He said the fourth layer is infrastructure, backed by India’s talent pool and policy framework. Vaishnaw pointed to a recent policy shift announced in the Union Budget aimed at bringing global data to India to reside and be processed here, and said the government expects large investments in data centres in the coming months.

On the fifth layer, energy, Vaishnaw said more than 50 per cent of India’s power generation capacity is now from clean and renewable sources. 

He also cited reforms in the nuclear energy sector, calling it a way to provide baseload clean power. He said India’s power grid has been “practically rebuilt” over the last decade.

Vaishnaw referred to the Stanford University AI Index, saying it places India among leading countries in AI adoption, AI talent and AI diffusion. 

He added that the government is conscious of challenges facing the IT industry and is working with industry and academia on upskilling, reskilling and building a new talent pipeline.

He said the benefits of AI must be balanced with safeguards, calling for collective solutions to mitigate risks and for human safety and dignity to remain central as AI adoption scales.