Natarajan Chandrasekaran
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Policy makers, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, it is an extraordinary privilege to be here this morning and participate in this AI summit. India is a nation of AI optimists. Our enthusiasm is not surprising. Indians have witnessed hugely ambitious digital infrastructure programs: the largest digital identity system covering 1.4 billion people, a digital payment interface that accounts for half of the world's transactions. Under our Prime Minister's vision, India has treated AI as a strategic national capability, aligning the full stack from chips to systems to energy and applications. Through Semicon India, India AI mission, and reforms like the Shanti Act for clean energy, we are building AI at scale with trust, resilience, and long-term competitiveness. AI is a foundational technology that cuts across all industries. AI is nothing artificial; it is real because it learns from data and learns faster every day. It is not based on fixed rules. AI can scale rapidly. AI is the next big infrastructure—the infrastructure of intelligence—with profound impact like steam engines, electricity, or the internet. Our mission should be to make AI work for every individual and citizen. We should put AI tools in the hands of the last person in the country and on earth. Recently, 1,500 rural women here in Bharat Mandapam, with no background in computing or digital tools, learned AI, built products, marketing materials, and campaigns in front of a global audience in just four hours. [applause] AI will have huge impact on public services delivery and enterprises. As someone from the IT industry, I see this as the biggest opportunity for the tech sector. The IT industry's real value is understanding enterprise business and technology landscapes and making the right technology work within processes and ecosystems. AI will expand that role, integrating AI agents into workflows, reimagining processes, and enabling transformation. At the Tata Group, we are adopting AI across the stack from silicon to systems to AI-ready data centers to applications and AI agents. We believe this journey will be exciting and require world-leading partners. I would like to make five points. First, the Tata Group is establishing India's first large-scale AI-optimized data center for next-generation AI training and inference. We have partnered with OpenAI to build the first 100 MW capacity, scaling to 1 GW. [applause] Second, we announced with AMD yesterday to combine world-class AI rack architecture with Tata's strength in infrastructure, engineering, power, and solutions to create sustainable high-density AI capacity in India for global standards. Third, we are building an AI data insights platform based on diverse Indian datasets on top of foundational models, making intelligence available across Indian contexts. Fourth, TCS and Tata Communications are building an AI operating system for industries, creating agentic industry solutions for every industry. We are well on the journey and will work with partners to launch globally. Fifth, I thank our Prime Minister for the vision enabling our foray into chips and semiconductors. We will build domain-centric, AI-optimized chips, first for the automotive sector. These are the areas we are focused on. It is time to turn promise into practice to deliver prosperity. In conclusion, we are at a defining moment: the age of abundant intelligence, where scarce resources are trust, stewardship, and human capability. Let us send out a simple standard for the AI decade: capability with dignity, high impact for every watt of energy, and progress with agency and collaboration. Thank you.
