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AI is emerging to be the new battleground for global powers to show their dominance. Days after Trump announced $500 billion in building AI infra across the US generating over 1.00.000 jobs, Chinese startup DeepSeek rolled out R1, challenging OpenAI’s model.
With India making strides in deep tech and AI, and its rising prominence in space tech, it appears that the Indian government and large tech services companies should start evaluating a global plan to be a strong contender as an AI partner.
As India’s geopolitics leans towards being a US ally, Indian tech giants stand at the precipice of fast changing industry, which is seeing accelerated disruption. As the US starts building data centres across the country, this can emerge as an untapped opportunity for the Indian tech sector. With a growing focus on AI tech, Machine Learning, the tech companies can be a preferred partner for Infrastructure support, software development.
Being a part of a global ecosystem, focused on building AI infra, can also offer collaborative opportunities to Indian tech companies specializing in AI, machine learning (ML), and analytics by collaborating with US-based firms to leverage the enhanced computational capabilities of these data centers.
Here are some views from the industry:
Bhaskar Majumdar, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures
I strongly believe that India should see AI as a "solution", rather than software. India is jumping on to AI mission with massive Nvidia GPU purchase plans. Indian solution makers are also thinking of AI as building it on top of Nvidia cloud accelerators.
The Deepseek moment is a reminder that accepting the status quo is a wrong strategy. All of us will witness significantly power efficient, high performance, solution centric chips in the next few years that will shake the likes of Nvidia. Anticipation of this disruption will benefit India and its solutions community. This was the logic of us investing in Netrasemi as the company believes in this disruption and betting on this change.
Narendra Bhandari, General Partner, Seafund
DeepSeek and some of the other newer models have demonstrated a fantastic opportunity for India. The Indian startups can aspire to build relevant models at much lower costs. The government should focus on a few areas.
* Fund the capital build out as laid out in the budgets to much higher returns in the new environment.
* Attract talent (Indian diaspora) from across the globe to help build out these newer models. It has been demonstrated that smaller teams can build this quickly.
* Balance the research funding to include universities, research labs and fund of funds. Focus on deeptech investors to drive and manage the innovation pace.
Government and investors should continue to focus on the design capabilities (ex. DLI), and expand funding significantly. Accelerate the adoption of Indian designs by large computing installation. We believe this is the right time to focus on the India opportunity in building AI models because DeepSeek has shown that innovation can be done at a much lower cost.
Bruce Keith, Co-Founder & CEO, InvestorAi
DeepSeek R1 has definitely challenged the dominance of a few players in the models and data ecosystem - OpenAI, Google and Meta will feel it the most. R1 will have a significant impact in the AI landscape. The announcement drives home the importance of innovation and focusing on the applications and data, rather than just the processing power. This genuinely democratizes AI, and gives countries who don’t have the existing infrastructure a huge leap forward to experiment and be part of the frontier.
The fact that they created this platform with under $6 million investments has shaken the tech CEOs globally, highlighting that game-changing innovations don’t necessarily need billion dollar investments.
However, from a supply/demand perspective the GPU market, which Nvidia dominates, is still far away from hitting peak demand.