So Sunil, you've also seen periods of great disruption in India when the voice cost was done away, you had very low data cost, and you had new players coming in causing massive market disruption. Those must have been very difficult days for you. What was your resilience and strategy to meet that competition?
Well, I won't call it players, I'll call it a player, because other players we could manage reasonably comfortably. This one player was of course difficult. 2002, 2003 was our first encounter – difficult one. The question was not if, the question was when will we shut down. We came out of that with some difficulty, a lot of bruises, probably deep cuts, but we managed to come out. Fast forward to 2010, when in a surprise move, the player picked up the spectrum. We knew the playbook. Six years – because the launch happened in 2016, September 2010 they got the spectrum. Those six years we could see the buildup of artillery, the troops. We had time. A lot of other people probably underestimated what was coming. We knew the power of the tsunami is going to be a tectonic shift on the plates of the telecom industry. Those six years gave us a lot of time to bolster our defenses, and when the tsunami hit, eight or nine players just got completely destroyed. I think we stood firm. One reason was we knew the game, we knew the industry. But if I have to put one single factor into why we could survive and others could not, it was our people. The talent in this industry counts for everything. If your people are motivated, if they were inspired, if they were charged up, it didn't matter who they were fighting. When I was traveling across the country at that time, I could see it on the faces of the people – they wouldn't care, they would do what is required to serve the customer. If you have a team which is inspired, they can do great things. So the battle was fought in the marketplace really.
Completely, a bit in the regulatory area as well.
Only a bit or quite a bit? Okay. So tell me, you suddenly moved into the space sector. You had a collaboration with OneWeb, from infrastructure on ground to infrastructure in space and the world of satellites. How do you see the telecom economy changing in due course? It's really incumbent upon you as a leader of the pack to continuously look at the shifts that are happening globally.
Yeah. I was a part of OneWeb long years back along with some other pioneers. But I came out of it after two years because I couldn't see it successfully getting put together.
And then we were invited again during the Covid time, in the lockdown period, by the British government to revive this company, to have a European UK play in satellite, because satellite connectivity was coming through.
Sunil, the fact is there are still two billion people in the world who have no connectivity. Whatever we may do, my industry has been trying across the globe spending hundreds of billions of dollars every year, but you can't bring a fiber to them – it's impossible. You can't even bring a radio signal to them. The only way is through satellite connectivity. But the geostationary satellites are at about 36,000 kilometers. They have 560 to 570 milliseconds of latency. You can't give today's product which is video, streaming, or real-time telemetry on those speeds. You can do broadcasting very well. LEO held hope, but it was being questioned all the time. OneWeb was actually ahead of even Starlink. But then came Elon Musk and he started falling in the LEO 350-400 km range, putting up thousands of satellites which we all see now, and the game changed completely. So if as a telecom company you don't move into that area where with, say, 20,000 satellites – call them cell towers in space – can serve the entire globe, you will be missing a very important area of defense. That was the reason we went into space. But having recognized that OneWeb will still have a limitation, we have tied up with Starlink in India and Africa. You can raise your hand anywhere and you can be connected now. This was the holy grail of our industry; I think that has been firmly established now.
So you've ventured into new areas – you've got into cloud, you've got into AI infrastructure. How do you see the future of Airtel? Will you remain a telephone company or will you become an AI company that also handles telephone networks?
Look, we are a company which understands the needs of our customers, and I believe we do a good job with that. We follow what the needs of the customers are and match it with technology. We don't produce any technology ourselves. Currently, given the geopolitical issues we saw, sovereign cloud – call it whatever you want – is a necessity now. We cannot rely on just Google Cloud or Microsoft or Amazon. They will have their role to play, but if you want to run banking services, India's digital records, government services, critical defense applications, you will need to have a sovereign cloud.
But you're also tied up with Perplexity and you're allowing Indian data to flow out of India.
Data is flowing through Facebook and search engines all the time anyway. That's a separate debate. But we will be securing India's data where it's required to be stored – not necessarily retail customer data, but enterprise customer data in India. We are now connecting banks, connecting enterprises. We are the go-to person for government orders that will sit in the cloud here. To expand on your question, we are a digital connectivity player first and foremost. We build billions of dollars of infrastructure every year. We get spectrum and get it through radio so that the customer can get it from wherever they are. Networks have evolved from pure digital connectivity providers to intelligent networks, and now to supremely intelligent networks. The next generation of network will take this to the next level – from super-intelligent networks, we are moving decisively into sensing networks. What you're going to be wearing – your spectacles, my watch, earpods – they will be sensing what's going on in the world. If Dr. J. Shankar is sitting with Marco Rubio, the glasses on his eye will tell him the twitch on his muscle allows him some more negotiations. That is the level this is going to go – it's going to be seeing everything, listening to everything, seeing your own body rhythm. All this is going to come through, and your device smartphones are going to be less useful because everything is happening around your eyes. That is where this world is going. You have to build massive AI compute capacity in the country, AI data centers, and have your own cloud because this will require massive silicon power – semiconductor – but importantly compute in your devices.
Sunil, since AI will be such a transformational force in the days to come, we are working with about 30,000 GPUs. Suddenly you have OpenAI talking about 11 gigawatts, which is 5 million GPUs from Nvidia. The scale of transformation is phenomenal. We are providing computing power to our startups and researchers, opening up our data banks. But what more do we need to do to really build our own large language models and applications and make a quantum technological leap forward?
One is basic infrastructure – that's fundamental. What do these large, guzzling GPUs need? Power. Land is plentiful here; we need to have more power, hopefully green power, because it requires so much power that you'll heat the entire globe. And then you need people to start working on our local LLMs. There are 1.5 billion people here, enough data floating through our networks. We need to have our local people building our own LLMs to ensure that we are one of the players in AI, not just a pure consumer of AI.
Any vision of getting into data centers as well as the next step?
We are in data centers. We are one of the leading players. We are at about 250 megawatts at the moment. We just signed a 300-megawatt single site with Google in Andhra Pradesh, in Visakhapatnam. More is coming. We will scale up to a gigawatt fairly quickly; that work is going on.
Sunil, India is the only country which does fast payment, credit, stock market transaction, insurance – all within 30 seconds to one minute on the mobile. What is the next disruption India should drive through the mobile telephone?
The digital public infrastructure that you spoke about, on which we entirely rest our digital stack – payments, education, healthcare, digital locker, government subsidies, DBT – that has been transformational. It is being acknowledged around the world. I work with a lot of African countries desperate to get this lifted and shifted into their countries. Some work has started. What more can happen? If the fiscal part is taken care of through FinTech, investments through stock markets are real-time, healthcare records are real-time. This whole DPI we have developed is the base on which new services should be launched all the time by our startups, which is happening.
Let me switch gears a bit. You've passed through the regulatory period of India's regime, seen free enterprise emerging. You're a product of that free enterprise. The Prime Minister's vision is to take India from a $4 trillion to a $30-plus trillion economy by 2047. That means GDP has to grow nine times, manufacturing 16 times. What should India do?
Yesterday we heard the RBI Governor talking about the Goldilocks moment. It is a Goldilocks moment at the moment. Growth is good. India's work ethics are excellent. I work in Europe now, in France and the UK, and I see the difference. We have a restless population in India, young people coming into the mainstream, more engineers graduating every year and entering the workplace. There is enough going on for us to get to that 2047 vision of being one of the most important economic countries in the world. Will we get to $30 trillion? I think we don't have to quibble about whether it's 2047 or 2052 – we will get there. Even if it's $22-23 trillion, it's a sizable economy, which is why the whole world is engaged with India today. They listen to what we need, negotiate with us on equal terms. India must close all its trade deals – that opens opportunities. Invest heavily in infrastructure, continue to do so. Ease of doing business is very important. India has tremendous animal spirits which, if unshackled, can create dramatic improvements. We have seen in the last many years – your and my generation have seen three eras: 1960s to 1990s, 1990 to 2020, and 2020 to the next era – these are transformational. Mr. Enk Singh is sitting here; I dealt with him in the previous era. For everything you needed a license, a permit. Where we are today, you can open a company in an hour, you don't need any license, you can start whatever you want to manufacture. Startups are coming up every day. The market is there, the government is fully committed. We have a leader who wants India to be Viksit Bharat; he wants us to be successful. What more can we ask for?
