Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw recently outlined India’s artificial intelligence strategy at a panel discussion titled ‘AI Power Play, No Referees’ during the World Economic Forum in Davos. The Minister emphasised that India is firmly positioned among the first bouquet of AI nations, driven by large-scale diffusion, economic viability and techno-legal governance.

Addressing global AI alignments and geopolitics, Shri Vaishnaw said India is working across the entire AI stack, spanning applications, models, chips, infrastructure and energy. He noted that the real return on investment in AI comes from enterprise deployment and productivity gains rather than the pursuit of extremely large models. According to him, nearly 95 per cent of AI use cases can be addressed using models in the 20–50 billion parameter range, many of which India is already deploying across sectors.

The Minister cautioned against equating geopolitical influence with ownership of very large AI models, observing that such models can be switched off and may create economic stress for developers. He stressed that AI power in the next industrial phase will be driven by low-cost solutions delivering high returns, supported increasingly by CPUs, smaller models and custom silicon.

Highlighting India’s approach to AI diffusion, Shri Vaishnaw said the government has enabled affordable AI compute by empanelling around 38,000 GPUs through a public–private partnership model. The subsidised national compute facility provides access to students, researchers, startups and innovators at nearly one-third of global costs.

On governance, the Minister outlined India’s techno-legal approach to AI regulation, combining legal frameworks with technical tools. He noted that India is developing systems to detect deepfakes, mitigate bias and ensure proper unlearning of AI models, with an emphasis on evidentiary robustness suitable for judicial scrutiny.

The panel was moderated by Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group and included global leaders from industry, finance and policymaking, reflecting the growing international focus on responsible, economically grounded AI deployment.