Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology, outlined India’s strategy to transform itself from a global technology services leader to a product powerhouse across multiple sectors, including semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
“After the success of having five semiconductor units where construction is going on, this year we’ll have our first ‘Make in India’ chip rolled out from the first plant,” Vaishnaw said during his address at the NASSCOM 2025 event. The Minister revealed plans to develop 25 semiconductor products as part of this transformation.
The government has made substantial progress in creating an AI ecosystem in India through what Vaishnaw called the “DPI framework” – focusing on computing facilities, datasets, and foundational models. “When we targeted 10,000 GPUs, we got applications for 18,000 GPUs,” he noted, highlighting the strong demand for AI computing resources.
A key competitive advantage for Indian researchers and start-ups is the significantly lower cost of GPU access. “The price now is less than a dollar, compared to the global standards of $2.5 to $3/GPU hour,” Vaishnaw explained.
Expanding horizons
The Minister emphasised that India’s AI ambitions extend beyond mere service provision or application development. “We could have limited ourselves to being a use case capital, being an application service provider capital of the world, but we want to become much more than that,” he stated.
According to Vaishnaw, India is pursuing a comprehensive AI strategy that includes developing indigenous foundational models, creating anonymised non-personal datasets for training, establishing centres of excellence for AI research, and integrating AI education into universities.
The minister highlighted India’s unique approach to Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) as another strategic advantage. “Our approach probably will help us stand out in the coming months and years, because very rarely do we find a large public sector data set availability,” Vaishnaw said, explaining how India’s structured DPI provides valuable data for AI development.
India’s technology services sector continues to show strong growth, he said, “We are adding two Global Capability Centres (GCCs) every week.” However, he identified talent as a critical factor for sustaining this momentum.
Talent pipeline
To address the talent pipeline challenge, the Minister called for greater industry-academia collaboration. “For our industry, for the IT industry, the availability of high-quality talent is going to be a defining factor,” he said, urging NASSCOM to work with the government to scale up initiatives like ‘Future Skills’ and reform university curricula.
He cited the example of Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya in Vadodara, Gujarat, where companies like Airbus were given complete freedom to design course curricula. “Industry knows what it needs,” he said, advocating for replicating this model to produce job-ready graduates.
On global AI governance, Vaishnaw highlighted India’s contribution to international dialogue. “The big contribution that we have made in the global AI dialogue is that a simple legislation of whatever magnitude, whatever complexity, will not help. It has to be technology plus legislation,” he stated.
The minister also highlighted India’s position that regulation should not stifle innovation. “We should take care of the harm that may be caused to society and control them, but we should not let innovation be stifled the way many other countries have approached the problem,” he said.