Explained : Opinion | Code, Power And Politics: Why Modi Sees AI As The New Frontier Of Geopolitics | Opinion News and Its Impact

It is a struggle that can define the rest of the 21st century, over whose values, security assumptions and regulatory philosophies will be embedded deep inside other nations’ digital infrastructure.

At the same time, AI is transforming the conduct of conflict and coercion. Open-source work and UN reporting have already documented autonomous systems engaging human targets, raising questions about whether meaningful human control can be preserved in lethal decision-making.

The same underlying techniques power hyper-realistic deepfakes, synthetic media and automated propaganda operations that have the capacity to be tuned to local languages and grievances. Ultimately, it may just erode trust in institutions and make societies more vulnerable to manipulation.

No country, therefore, can afford to treat AI as an afterthought. As a recent Atlantic Council assessment put it, the question is no longer whether AI will reshape the global order, but how quickly and at what cost. That is the backdrop against which Modi’s AI diplomacy needs to be read.

Why Modi wants to host the world on AI

Modi has made clear in recent months that he sees technology, and AI in particular, as one of the main levers for turning the slogan of Viksit Bharat into a concrete development strategy. In a wide-ranging pre-Budget interview, he linked India’s newfound confidence in negotiating free trade agreements with 38 countries to deeper structural reforms, a push for innovation and an ambition to make India a global hub for digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence. Essentially, the idea is to attract data centre investments using fiscal incentives and position India as a trusted host for the world’s data, just as AI drives explosive demand for computing.

The IndiaAI Mission is the domestic backbone of this ambition. Approved in 2024 with an outlay of about ₹10,372 crore over five years, it aims to “make AI in India and make AI work for India”, combining state-subsidised compute, data platforms, foundational models, skills and safety research. According to the Electronics and IT Ministry, India has already ramped up from a target of 10,000 graphics processing units to 38,000 GPUs, available to developers at a subsidised rate, and has seeded India-specific foundation models and multilingual platforms such as BharatGen and Bhashini.

For a country seeking “sovereign AI” capabilities in its own languages, this is not just an industrial policy; it is a statement that India will not outsource its cognitive infrastructure entirely to foreign platforms.

Hosting the India AI Impact Summit, with participation projected from over 100 countries, more than 15 heads of state and hundreds of CEOs and experts, is therefore both a performance and a power play. It allows New Delhi to showcase these domestic investments, launch a sovereign Indian large language model on a global stage, and present its governance template to a room that includes both advanced economies and the wider Global South.

Competing AI models, and India’s “third path”

The contest over AI is increasingly a contest over rules. The United States, under President Donald Trump, is doubling down on exporting its technology stack. Washington’s National Security Strategy explicitly states that American standards in AI, biotech and quantum must “drive the world forward”. China is using state-steered industrial policy with tight political control of data and platforms, and is leaning into open-source AI and applied deployments to capture market share in emerging economies. The European Union is pushing a rights- and risk-based AI Act that aims to set the gold standard for regulation, even if it raises compliance burdens.

India is trying to position itself differently. New Delhi’s approach is an attempt to offer the Global South a governance model that neither replicates the US deregulatory bias nor the Chinese state-surveillance template nor the EU’s heavy compliance architecture.

Rather than rushing a standalone AI law, the government has issued AI Governance Guidelines that lean on existing instruments, the IT Act, criminal law and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, to handle deepfake impersonation, unlawful data use and misinformation, while patching gaps through targeted amendments.

It’s an attempt to use old laws and fix gaps in them. If India can show that this strategy can manage AI risks without throttling innovation, it will have something tangible to offer peers in Africa, Asia and Latin America: a lower-cost, capacity-sensitive regulatory route that still takes safety seriously.

It is one of the many reasons multilateral experts see the India AI Impact Summit as the first Global South-led moment in the emerging AI governance calendar, after earlier high-profile meetings in the UK, South Korea and France.

Cognitive sovereignty and the material base of AI power

Former senior UN officials and Indian diplomats have begun to frame AI-enabled information operations, deepfakes and behavioural profiling as a new form of “unrestricted warfare” waged on the minds of citizens rather than on physical borders. And it has raised a sharper concern in Delhi’s strategic thinking, the concern of “cognitive sovereignty”.

There has been a global pattern of foreign information manipulation and interference. Democracies like India face constant attempts to fracture trust, polarise publics and narrow the state’s freedom of action through synthetic narratives and engineered outrage.

India’s strategic discourse now explicitly links this cognitive battlefield to hardware and supply chains. AI-driven influence runs on compute, which runs on chips, data centres and critical minerals.

The IndiaAI Mission, with its investments in domestic models, data platforms and safety research, and the National Critical Mineral Mission, with ₹34,300 crore approved to secure supply chains, are therefore parts of the same project. To ensure that India retains agency over the infrastructure of persuasion and remains able to “keep societies thinking clearly under pressure”.

Yet cognitive sovereignty requires physical sovereignty over the AI stack. GPUs, high-bandwidth memory, advanced packaging and reliable fabrication capacity are now strategic assets in their own right.

India’s answer has been to couple the IndiaAI Mission with an aggressive semiconductor industrial strategy: the Semicon India Programme and the India Semiconductor Mission, backed by a ₹76,000 crore incentive outlay, and the recent clearance of ten projects worth about ₹1.6 lakh crore, including two fabrication plants and eight assembly and testing units.

It indicates India’s intent to want and gain a foothold across the chip value chain rather than just being a large market and design hub. For AI, which is ravenous for specialised accelerators and high-performance memory, building even parts of that chain domestically reduces exposure to export controls, supply shocks and geopolitical chokepoints.

It also strengthens India’s bargaining position when courting global cloud providers and model developers, including those whose investments are key to middle-power AI capability.

Malaysia and an Asia-centric AI corridor

The US–China race over AI is already spilling into trade retaliation on critical minerals and chip supply chains. Regions like Latin America, the Gulf and others are turning into contested terrain. At the same time, major powers are exporting rival AI stacks and governance models to lock in dependencies and extend influence. In that environment, an Asia-centric semiconductor and AI corridor anchored by India in the Global South is a rare example of middle-power agency. In addition, India’s recent layered semiconductor partnership with Malaysia will help plug gaps in India’s current domestic semiconductor machinery.

Such a corridor would knit together India’s scale in talent, digital public infrastructure and AI deployment with Malaysia’s manufacturing depth, enabling the Global South to negotiate with Washington, Beijing, Brussels and Tokyo from a position of greater resilience. It would also align with India’s broader effort to represent the Global South on AI governance. Advocating a pro-development, welfare-centric approach that uses existing laws smartly and reserves regulatory heavy artillery for genuinely high-risk use-cases.

It is the immediate need of the hour for the Global South nations, who cannot spend as much as their Western contemporaries, or enable complete state control as is in China.

International reactions to India’s initiatives have been closely watched: while Washington has voiced cautious support for India’s ambitions as a counterbalance to China, there is some concern in US policy circles about technology transfer and standards alignment. China, meanwhile, sees India’s efforts as part of a broader strategy by rival powers to reduce reliance on Chinese hardware and is responding by deepening its own partnerships in Southeast Asia and Africa.