Namaskar. Most respected Sri Sarat Chandra Pawasab. Honorable Sri Ajidada. Estim Supria GI Sunetra GI distinguished dignitaries on the DAS, respected faculty members and my dear young student friends. Thank you for inviting me on this momentous occasion. This inauguration of the Vidya Pistan Sarat Chandra Power Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence is indeed a historic moment and it is an honor to be here.
Bindu praatti orimhik and bamati stands as a symbol of one such transformation with a limitless potential all made possible by the vision of an extraordinary leader. I call my mentor Sri Sarat Chandra Pawar.
My dear friends, I have been blessed to have known Parasai for almost more than three decades and what I have learned from him has no parallel. But beyond knowledge, it is his wisdom, his affection and his deep empathy that leaves the strongest imprint. That is why for me he has always been a mentor in the truest sense. Having visited Baramati dozens of times, I can say with absolute conviction that what Pawar has achieved here goes beyond just local development. By transforming agriculture, strengthening cooperatives, encouraging entrepreneurship, building educational institutions, establishing industry policy and doing so in an unparalleled integrated manner, Pawar has turned Baramati into a living blueprint for the whole of Bharat to learn from. But then as I look back, for Pawar was never an exception. It was a reflection on how he thought about the direction Bharat should be taking. In his role as a national leader, Pawar has shaped our nation's agriculture policy, food security, cooperative institutions and rural economy, and did so at a critical moment when the nation needed both stability and reform. Whether as a chief minister, union minister or going across party lines, Pawar's leadership has always reflected a rare ability to balance ground realities with the national agenda. Leaders like him remind us that good politics is not about slogans. It is about understanding that a nation does not rise through isolated victories but through the orderly alignment of its people, its institutions and its regions. When farmers are empowered, markets stabilize. When institutions are trusted, policies endure. When entrepreneurship is enabled, jobs are created. And when regions are strengthened, the nation stands taller.
And today as would be expected, the leader who transformed Baramati's soil now looks to yet again transform its future. While the seeds of yesterday were sown in the earth, the seeds of tomorrow will be sown in the algorithms. This is what I will now talk about.
My dear friends, human progress does not move in a straight line. It advances in leaps. Each leap propelled by a technology revolution that first unsettled society and then rebuilds at a far higher level of capability. The first industrial revolution harnessed the power of steam and mechanization. The second brought electrification and mass production. The third connected the world through digital computing and the internet. Today we are living through the fourth industrial revolution, an age defined by artificial intelligence. What history teaches us is that every such transition carries two opposing forces: extraordinary opportunity and profound anxieties. Fear of displacement. Fear of irrelevance. Fear of giving up control to systems we do not yet fully understand. These fears are not a sign of weakness. They are deeply human. They must be recognized, understood and addressed with honesty and responsibility, because history is remarkably consistent on one fact: technology does not destroy work. They first disrupt roles and then expand possibility. The first industrial revolution increased employment in Britain by over five times. The second created mass manufacturing, logistics, modern management jobs, absorbing millions into a new middle class. The third, the digital revolution, did not eliminate work. It accelerated innovation and produced software, services, platforms and entrepreneurship that now employ hundreds of millions globally. Looking back, each industrial revolution created far more jobs than it displaced, by unlocking entirely new industries and business models that were previously not imagined.
Bharat's own experience offers clear evidence. The mobile revolution, much as everyone had feared, did not destroy jobs. Instead, it multiplied them at a massive scale. When smartphones and low cost data reach ordinary Bharatiyas, it released an enormous surge of economic energy at the grassroots. The numbers are indisputable. Between 1991 and 2024, Bharat added over 230 million non-farm jobs. The majority created after the spread of digital infrastructure. For example, Flipkart was not built on legacy retail. It was born from a mobile-first discovery of digital commerce. Ola did not own cars. It unlocked idle assets by stitching together payments and locations. Swiggy turned neighborhood kitchens into city-scale enterprises. Paytm and FPE transformed every Kirana store into a financial node. None of these models were visible before mobile penetration. They did not arise from policy alone or capital alone. They emerged when capability reached the common citizen. And therefore I can confidently say that artificial intelligence will now represent the next and far more powerful leap, because if mobile gave Bharat greater access, AI will give Bharat greater capability. Let me explain.
Jan Dhan and UPI enable financial access and inclusion. Aadhaar established digital identity and mobile connectivity allowed us to leapfrog decades of physical infrastructure. And now AI is set to become the fourth foundation, embedding capability, decision making and productivity into every corner of the nation. Imagine that over this decade, as 1.4 billion Bharatiyas start to carry AI-powered intelligence in the palm of their hands, progress will no longer be linear. It will compound, accelerate and explode. A farmer will no longer be just a cultivator but become a one-person enterprise using AI to read soil and crop health, anticipate hyper-local weather, optimize inputs, negotiate prices, manage logistics and hedge risk in real time. A homemaker in a tier-three town will be able to create and scale a global micro-brand using nothing but her voice, while AI designs products, ensures compliance, runs marketing, manages supply chain and handles payments seamlessly in the background. The possibilities are endless. Skill and scale once separated by geography will collapse into a single interface. And I can say with confidence that this is not an incremental change. This is an explosion of possibility, limited only by human ambition, because every starting point and background will matter less than our capabilities. The world of AI will ensure that where you are born will no longer limit how far you can go. What will matter is how well you learn, adapt and use intelligence, both human and artificial. This is the true meaning of the AI moment. Not just a change in technology, but a civilizational leap in capability. A moment where intelligence becomes accessible to every citizen, enabling a billion Bharatiya minds to move from dependence to creation, and thereby establishing the most inclusive and accelerated growth era our nation has ever known.
However, my friends, as history has often shown us, every great technology leap is also a double-edged knife. And the fourth industrial revolution driven by AI is no exception, because growth without sovereignty creates dependence, and progress without control creates risk. My dear friends, while job creation is vital, a nation of 1.4 billion people cannot afford to place its jobs, data, culture and collective intelligence at the mercy of foreign algorithms and foreign balance sheets. While AI does enhance productivity, it also concentrates economic might, informational power and decision-making authority at a scale humanity has never encountered before. The greatest risk of this AI age is not that machines will think like humans, but that humans will let machines think for them. And across the world today, we can already see this reality unfolding. The strategic competition between the United States and China has made one fact clear: AI is no longer just a technology race. It is a contest for global domination. Semiconductors have become strategic assets. Data centers have become critical infrastructure. Foundational AI models have become instruments of influence. Therefore, if Bharat does not build its own AI models, its own compute infrastructure and its own intelligence ecosystems, then our behaviors, preferences, markets and decisions will be extracted, trained upon and monetized by other nations. Technology dominance is now the key lever of influence, and in the years ahead, mastery over AI will be the greatest source of power, wealth and national freedom. This is the new battleground. Bharat must therefore approach artificial intelligence not as a convenience, but as a strategic national capability built in Bharat, governed in Bharat and aligned with Bharat's national interest. And it is for this very reason that the Sarat Chandra Pawar Center of Excellence arrives at a moment of immense significance, as Bharat looks to steer herself to the forefront of the global AI revolution.
My dear friends, the AI future is not something that will automatically arrive in Bharat. It is something our nation must build. And I would now like to share how we at the Adani Group are building and participating in the AI revolution on both the supply side that creates sovereign capability and the demand side where AI is deployed at the infrastructure level. Let me begin with the supply side and talk about the underlying dependencies. AI depends on data centers. Data centers depend on energy, and energy is the key to national sovereignty. We recognized this as early as 2020: that data centers would soon become as essential to Bharat as highways, ports, airports and power plants. They would no longer be seen as just technology capabilities, but would become the intelligence infrastructure needed for sovereignty. These are now the factories of intelligence that will shape productivity and security and protect our economic power. At the same time, we saw clearly that the biggest constraint to the growth of data centers would not be capital or land, but energy, and more specifically clean, reliable and affordable green energy. It was at a conference in Singapore in 2020 that I stated that the upcoming energy demand from data centers would far exceed anything the world had witnessed. For us, this was not just a market forecast. It was an opportunity as well as a call for nation building. And therefore we made a critical choice to invest 75 billion US dollars into the energy transition years ahead of the curve to prepare for a technology revolution that we saw as inevitable. And while much of the world is constrained by high energy cost, we enter this decade with a structural advantage. Through the world's most integrated green energy ecosystem that we have now built, we are positioned to supply the world's least cost green electrons. Much of it is being generated at the world's largest single-site renewable energy park in Khavda in Gujarat's Kutch district. This park is spread over 520 square kilometers with a peak capacity of 30 gigawatts. Also with 15 ports across Bharat's coastlines, we are uniquely positioned to serve as a primary landing destination for global undersea cables. And through our national transmission networks, we can connect many of the data centers within the country, creating a digital backbone that is resilient, scalable and sovereign. This integrated vision has made us the fastest growing data center platform in Bharat with the largest order book in the country. But more importantly, it positions Bharat not merely as a consumer of artificial intelligence, but as a builder, host and exporter of intelligence.
Let me now speak about the demand side of AI and why it matters to you as researchers and students. The most important question in AI today is not what a model can do. Large language models have already shown that they can write, read, summarize and predict. Real transformation begins when the AI models step into the real world: into airports, ports, power grids, factories, logistics corridors and cities. That is where AI stops being a tool you study and starts becoming a system that you operate. This is where the value of AI truly explodes. I call this the industrialization of AI. At the Adani Group we operate at an integrated scale that very few organizations in the world do. We run Bharat's largest ports and container terminals. We operate the country's largest private power generation capacity and the largest renewable energy ecosystem. We have built the largest solar manufacturing platform, the largest copper smelter and the largest privately managed airport network within Bharat. And my young friends, why does this matter to you? Because very few places in the world would allow young engineers, researchers and students to work at the intersections of physical infrastructure, energy systems, industrial manufacturing, logistics networks and digital platforms at such a national scale. This makes our ecosystem a living laboratory for what I call industrial AI that addresses large-scale real-world problems. For example, how do you use LLMs to predict failures before a power grid goes down? How do you use computer vision to optimize ports where berth capacity is a constraint? How do you use AI to make airports safer, faster and more human? How do you use AI agents to reduce energy loss, emissions and waste? I can confidently say that in the months ahead, AI will transform how we procure, how we build, how we operate, how we maintain assets and how we serve our customers. And the people who will design these systems will not be abstract high-level experts. They will mostly be students like you that are native AI citizens. And this is precisely where our partnership with the Sarat Chandra Pawar Center of Excellence finds its deeper meaning.
So it is in this spirit that I am pleased to share that we are entering into a transformative partnership and formally signing an MOU with Vidya Pratishthan Baramati. This partnership is a commitment to build applied technological capability where AI research, engineering and execution move together in an integrated fashion. Needless to say, this partnership carries forward the legacy of Pawar, always rooted in institution building, long-term thinking and the belief that empowering young minds is the most sustainable way to build Bharat. So my young friends, as I start to wrap up, I urge you to remember Pawar has built you this AI institute ready to take on the world. This institute has given you the compass to show you the path, and the path that you choose will decide how Bharat will shape her future.
Every era has had a unique aspect of citizenship. This era of AI is demanding your capability: Samya, Soga, the capability to think independently; Samura, Ga, the capability to create with your own hands; and the capability to give India a new direction. So rise, not just to read the chapters, but to become the author of Bharat's story. Rise, not just to walk the path, but to build the roads for Bharat's tomorrow. Rise, not just for personal success, but to anchor the boldest dreams of Bharat. Rise, not just to celebrate history, but to build the monuments that define Bharat. Rise, not just to sing the anthem, but be the wind to carry Bharat's flag higher. This is the moment. This is the opportunity and this moment belongs to you. Jai Hind.
