How India is building the world’s most inclusive AI infrastructure

As the India AI Impact Summit 2026 unfolds at Bharat Mandapam, the air is thick with a sense of historic inevitability. At the AWS Symposium organised on the sidelines of the Summit, the conversation has shifted to the “India Way”, a model of digital transformation that prioritises scale, inclusion, and public good over mere profit.

At the centre of this shift is a deepening partnership between the Indian government’s IndiaAI Mission and Amazon Web Services (AWS). In a panel discussion featuring Jaime Valles (VP, AWS APJC) and Uwem Ukpong (VP, AWS Global Industries), the leaders outlined a vision where AI is not just a tool for the elite, but the foundational “operating system” for a nation of 1.4 billion people.

The digital public infrastructure of tomorrow

India’s success with UPI and Aadhaar has already rewritten the playbook for digital services. Now, AWS is betting that AI will be the next layer of this Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). With a massive investment of over Rs 1.1 lakh crore (USD 12.7 billion) into local cloud and AI infrastructure by 2030, AWS is positioning itself as the engine behind India’s sovereign AI ambitions.

“The cloud, the technology is going to democratise the most important opportunity, opportunity for every single human in India and in the world,” said Jaime Valles. “We see AI as the operating system and infrastructure that will enable that foundation for India’s development.”

AWS is actively supporting the IndiaAI Mission by providing access to thousands of GPUs and 20 years of cloud expertise to build sovereign AI platforms. These platforms are designed to be reliable, secure, and, most importantly, uniquely Indian.

Language and data

While the potential is vast, the challenges of a country as diverse as India are equally significant. Uwem Ukpong highlighted that for AI to be truly pervasive, it must overcome the “last mile” hurdles of language and data access.

With 22 official languages, English-centric AI models often fail the grassroots economy. Through initiatives like Kisan Sarthi, the government and AWS are opening up data silos to innovators.

“If you address these barriers… this is how we really start to get AI down to the grassroots and down to the informal economy,” Ukpong noted, referencing the 490 million people currently operating in India’s informal sectors who stand to benefit most.

From “pilot” to “planet”

One of the most striking insights from the discussion was the sheer scale of Indian innovation. In most markets, a “pilot” might involve a few thousand users. In India, as Valles pointed out, a pilot is often a full rollout by global standards.

“I learned that what is a pilot in India is a full rollout in other countries in the world,” remarked Jaime Valles, VP of AWS APJC. “The pilots here are 30, 40, 50 million… that’s the scale you need in order to leverage AI to truly transform the way we do things.”

This “India scale” demands infrastructure that is not just fast, but sovereign and resilient. By treating AI as the new operating system for development, the collaboration between the IndiaAI Mission and AWS is building a digital public infrastructure capable of supporting billions of transactions, from the National Health Authority to UPI.

That scale is also turning India into a global exporter of technology. Solutions developed for Kisan Sarthi (Farmer’s Guide) or the National Health Authority are now being studied and replicated in the Philippines, Nigeria, and Latin America.

“What I love here in India is the fact that the learnings and the technology deployed here is being propagated to developing countries and developed countries in the world,” said Ukpong. “That technology… came from India, from AWS.”

The road to 2047

As India marches toward its Viksit Bharat 2047 goal of becoming a developed nation, AI is being viewed as the primary “power lifter”. By leapfrogging traditional bureaucratic processes and providing real-time weather, pricing, and data to the remotest corners of the country, AI is creating what Valles calls a “culture of experimentation”.