India’s AI debate is moving past data centres, with experts asking whether it will build domestic AI models and chips or host foreign ones.

Ajai Chowdhry, co-founder of HCL and chairman of the National Quantum Mission’s governing board, shared his view with sources.

He said data centres use up land, power and water, and that the bigger question is what India owns around them, from chips to AI models and platforms.

Here is why that matters. A data centre is a building packed with computers that run AI.

If global companies set these up in India but the chips, AI models and the rights to them stay abroad, Chowdhry said, a big part of the value chain stays overseas.

He added that such sites can create relatively few direct jobs for the resources they use.

The government has already put money behind the building side. The IndiaAI Mission has an outlay of about Rs 10,372 crore.

Its shared computing pool, made up of GPUs, the powerful chips that train AI, crossed 45,000 by June 2026, according to the PIB.

By August 2026, around 237 projects had tapped this subsidised computing and used 93.18 lakh GPU hours.

On the model side, the government picked 20 home-grown proposals out of 506 applications.

Twelve are large multimodal models and eight are small language models, and the applicants keep the intellectual property.

A shared platform called AI Kosh is meant to host datasets and models for developers.

Chowdhry also sees room for smaller models built for specific jobs and run closer to where data is produced, which suits firms handling sensitive information.

The Indian AI Research Organisation, funded by the Gujarat government, the Centre and the Indian Pharma Alliance, is already working on compact models for sectors such as healthcare, agriculture and finance.

India has also demonstrated a 1,000 km secure quantum communication link, and startups backed by the National Quantum Mission have grown from eight to 17.

Chowdhry said success would mean India becomes ‘a builder of AI’ with its own models, accelerators and systems, not just a home for foreign data centres.

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