#334 Abhishek Singh: The $1.2 Billion Plan to Turn India Into an AI Superpower

What if the country that trained the world's engineers finally decided to keep them?

In this episode of Eye on AI, Craig Smith sits down with Abhishek, the civil servant leading India's $1.2 billion national AI Mission, to explore how one of the world's largest and most diverse nations is mounting a serious challenge to US and Chinese dominance in artificial intelligence.

Abhishek breaks down the honest story behind India's late start. World-class talent, but no research ecosystem to retain it. Digitization without AI-usable data. Compute so scarce that the entire country had fewer than 500 GPUs just two years ago. And a brain drain so severe that the engineers India trained are now running the biggest tech companies in the world, just not from India.

Abhishek walks through exactly how the mission is tackling each of those gaps. A subsidized compute program that gives researchers and startups access to 38,000 GPUs at under a dollar per hour. AI Kosh, a national data platform pulling public and private sector datasets into a single AI-ready repository. Centers of Excellence connecting IITs around domain-specific research in agriculture, healthcare, education and mobility. And a sovereign LLM program, with four models already in development and eight more on the way, built specifically for India's languages, voices and needs.

We also get into the geopolitics. Where India stands as the US and China carve out competing AI spheres of influence. Why Abhishek is pushing for a UN-led governance framework rather than aligning with either bloc. And what it would actually take for a country of 1.4 billion people to not just catch up, but leapfrog.

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(00:00) Introduction and Abhishek's Background

(02:43) What the India AI Mission Is and How It Started

(04:53) The $1.2 Billion Budget and Total AI Investment in India

(06:36) Data Center Build-Out and the Road to 7 Gigawatts

(08:11) AI Kosh: India's National Data Platform

(10:50) Subsidized GPUs and How Researchers Access Compute

(12:41) Brain Drain, Reverse Migration and Retaining Top Talent

(17:24) Centers of Excellence Across IITs and Key Sectors

(19:21) Expanding Fellowships and Training the Next Generation

(20:11) Why India Started Late and What Changed

(21:48) Sovereign LLMs Built for Indian Languages and Needs

(22:42) The Diversity Challenge and Culturally Relevant AI

(23:16) Government Funding for Foundation Model Development

(24:12) The AI Impact Summit and India's Role on the Global Stage

(24:52) India, China, the US and the Battle for AI Governance

(29:37) The UN Framework and India's Third Way

(31:16) India-China Relations and New AI Partnerships

(32:01) How the $1.2 Billion Budget Was Decided

(33:31) Can India Actually Catch Up With the US and China