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N. Chandrasekaran
Chairman (Non-Executive), Tata Consumer Products Limited

Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran calls AI next big infrastructure at New Delhi summit

📅 Feb 18, 2026 The Hindu 30 MIN 643 VIEWS 1 SEGMENTS · 1 SPEAKERS
At the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran described artificial intelligence as the “next big infrastructure,” likening it to electricity and the internet, and urged that AI be made accessible to every citizen. He highlighted its transformative potential across industries and shared examples of rapid AI adoption among rural learners. #NChandrasekaran #TataSons #IndiaAISummit #NewDelhi #AIInfrastructure #InclusiveAI #TechSummit #TheHindu #BreakingNews #TopStories #NewsUpdate #IndiaNews #CurrentAffairs #TheHinduExplains#InDepth#Explained #Understandi...
N. Chandrasekaran 0:00 ↗
Honorable Prime Minister Sri Narendra Modi, your excellencies, heads of state, policy makers, and 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 the hugely ambitious digital infrastructure programs and what they can achieve: the largest digital identity system in the world covering 1.4 billion people, and a digital payment interface that accounts for half of the entire world's transactions. Over the past few years, under our honorable prime minister's vision, India has treated AI as a strategic national capability, aligning the full stack from chips to systems to energy and to applications through Semicon India and India AI Mission, and most importantly the recent reforms such as 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, and it is not based on any fixed rules. Third, AI can scale and it scales pretty rapidly. Putting all this together, AI to my mind is the next big infrastructure. It is the infrastructure of intelligence. It will have a very profound impact, exactly the same way in the past other infrastructure changes have done: steam engines, electricity, or internet. Our mission should be to make AI work for every individual and every citizen in this country. We should put the AI tools in the hands of the last person in the country and in fact on the earth. And that's the vision that we should all work towards. A couple of days ago we witnessed 1,500 rural women here in Bharat Mandapam who had no background to computing, no background to digital tools; in a matter of few hours could learn AI, could build products, could build marketing materials, campaigns all in front of a global audience. And they did it in four hours. AI will have huge impact on our public services delivery. It will have huge impact on enterprises around the world. Since I come from the background of IT industry, one word for the IT industry, it is in my opinion the biggest opportunity for the tech sector in the IT industry because the IT industry's real value is the context and understanding of every enterprise's business and technology landscape and make the right technology work inside the processes and the ecosystem—the supplier, customer, and all the other connections an enterprise has. AI will expand that role much further. It is the opportunity to integrate AI and AI agents into workflows, reimagine processes, and carry out the transformation mission so that every enterprise can realize its potential and realize its vision. Now I want to talk a little bit about the Tata Group. At the Tata Group, we are adopting AI across the stack from silicon to systems to AI-ready data centers to applications and agents. And we believe such a vision and such a journey is going to be extremely exciting and it will require us to work with world-leading partners in India and across the globe. I would like to make five points. The Tata Group is establishing India's first large-scale AI-optimized data center purpose-built for the next generation AI training and inference. I'm very happy to announce that we have partnered with OpenAI to build the first 100 megawatt capacity which will scale to 1 gigawatt. And we made an announcement with AMD yesterday where we will combine the world-class AI rack architecture with Tata's strength in infrastructure engineering, power, and solution capabilities to create a sustainable high-density capacity in India for global standards. The third, we are already building an AI data insights platform. Minister Ashwini articulated the layers of data or data architectures. What we are building is totally based on diverse Indian data sets on top of the foundational models. So intelligence becomes available across the diversity of Indian contexts. And the fourth, TCS and our other company Tata Communications together, we are building an AI operating system for industries. What we will do is to build agentic industry solutions for every industry. We are already well on that journey and we will work with partners to be able to launch it and take it to all enterprises around the globe. And finally, again I want to thank the vision of our prime minister which made it possible for us to make a serious foray into chips and semiconductors. What we will do next is to build chips that are very domain-centric which will be totally AI-optimized for every industry and we will first launch or work towards getting it ready for the automotive sector. So these are the areas that we are focused on. I think it is the time for promise to take action into practice so that we can deliver prosperity. Finally, in conclusion, I just want to say that we are standing here at a very defining moment. It is the age of abundant intelligence where the scarce resources are trust, stewardship, and human capability. So let us set out a simple standard for the decade: capability with dignity, high impact for every watt of energy, and progress with agency and collaboration. Thank you all very much.

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APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Chandrasekaran, N. (2026, February 18). Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran calls AI next big infrastructure at New Delhi summit [Interview transcript]. The Hindu. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1043726/

MLA

N. Chandrasekaran. "Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran calls AI next big infrastructure at New Delhi summit." The Hindu, 18 Feb. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1043726/.

BibTeX
@misc{chandrasekaran2026_1043726,
  author       = {N. Chandrasekaran},
  title        = {Tata Sons chairman N. Chandrasekaran calls AI next big infrastructure at New Delhi summit},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Hindu. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {feb},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1043726/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}