It is a privilege to be here at the 2026 CI Annual Business Summit. This year's theme asks us to look at the future of the global economy, industry, and society, and India's trajectory. But to understand the future, we must first question one of the key assumptions of the past.
For nearly three decades, we told ourselves that the world was flat. To that extent, we believed supply chains would remain open. We believed energy would flow predictably across oceans. We believed technology would ignore borders. We believed capital would move without a passport. We believed the cloud would have no nationality. We were wrong.
The world that is emerging is not flat. It is fractured. Supply chains are being redesigned around national interest. Energy has returned to becoming the center of security discussions. Semiconductors have become instruments of statecraft. Data is being treated as a national resource. Clouds are being weaponized, and artificial intelligence is being built behind the protective walls of data centers.
What has become even more obvious from the recent Middle East conflict and targeted attacks on infrastructure is that energy security and digital security are no longer independent dimensions. They are now the twin foundations of national power. And it is increasingly evident that the country that controls its energy will drive its industrial future. The country that controls its compute will drive its intelligence future. And the country that controls both will shape the century ahead. This is the new geometry of power.
Friends, if 1947 was about our political freedom, true independence in the 21st century will mean owning the energy that lights our homes and the intelligence that guides our minds. This is not a theory. And the two largest economies in the world, the United States and China, have understood this deeply. Their systems may be different, their politics may be different, their institutions may be different, but their strategic objectives are the same. No nation can call itself truly self-reliant if it depends on others for the energy that powers its economy or the intelligence that shapes its destiny.
Let me begin with the United States. The oil embargo of 1973-74 against the US was not just an energy shock; it was a geopolitical warning. Oil prices surged by nearly 300%, and the world's strongest economy, a superpower, could be weakened when its energy lifeline is controlled by others. America's response took decades. It came through research, policy, technology, and persistence. The result was the shale oil and gas revolution. Fracking and horizontal drilling transformed America from an import-dependent nation to an energy exporter. Today, the United States produces about 14 million barrels of crude oil per day, more than any other nation in the world. Natural gas already generates a fourth. But America did not stop with that. It is now investing in advanced nuclear, deep geothermal, large-scale renewables, grid-scale storage, and next-generation energy technology.
And not surprisingly, compute has now become the next control layer. Chips, clouds, and AI models are no longer just commercial assets. They are the factories of national intelligence. The conversations between the US government and the leading technology companies in the US are no longer just business conversations. They are strategic negotiations about controlling the technology infrastructure of the future.
China reached the same conclusions through a different route. It did not have America's shale, oil, and gas advantage. So it built a different architecture of self-reliance. Coal remained its baseload backbone for electricity, chemicals, industrial feedstocks, and strategic import substitution. At the same time, China executed one of the most aggressive renewable energy buildouts in human history. Even though coal accounts for about 60% of China's electricity generation, clean power has risen sharply. In 2025, China installed a record 440 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity. This was a staggering 64% of all global additions in 2025.
On the digital side, China recognized early that AI leadership cannot depend on foreign chips, foreign platforms, or foreign models. Despite export controls, it has made artificial intelligence a national objective and is building the infrastructure to deliver it. America built energy abundance and now seeks compute dominance. China built industrial scale and now seeks AI sovereignty. Energy and intelligence are now inseparable. They must be treated as national priorities because a nation that does not build that capability in peace is forced to pay for its exposure in crisis.
My dear friends, having set this context, let me turn to India. India's path will not be America's path. It will not be China's path. But India has something uniquely powerful because we are not building for an abstract future. We are building for a living, rising, demanding India—for households moving up, cities expanding outwards, factories coming alive, vehicles turning electric, and millions of small businesses waiting to scale. India's advantage is simple. Everything we build will already have demand waiting for it. The task before us is to build the capacity that can keep pace with the demand.
And on energy, India has made extraordinary progress. As of March 2026, India has crossed 500 gigawatts of installed power capacity. A staggering 53% of this capacity has been added over the past 10 years, and India is well on its way to add another 4x capacity over the next two decades to take India to 2,000 gigawatts by 2047. This is not symbolic progress. This is nation-scale execution—growing rapidly, industrializing deeply, digitizing massively, and decarbonizing meaningfully, all at the same time.
And the GDP trajectory is the best manifestation of the growth story. It took India 67 years after independence to become a $2 trillion economy. But it took just seven years to add the next two trillion. My dear friends, India is no longer growing through incremental addition. India is growing through compounding acceleration. Every road, port, airport, factory, energy asset, and data center augments the next layer of growth. At this pace, India will add the equivalent of a new European economy to its GDP every decade. This is not linear growth. This is compounding national power.
We have seen this movie before. A decade ago, few imagined the scale of India's mobile data explosion. But once smartphones became affordable, networks expanded, data prices fell, and consumption exploded. AI will create a similar surge, but this surge will be far more energy-hungry. Data center capacity, which is expected to reach 5 gigawatts by 2030, could rise to nearly 75 gigawatts by 2047. That is why India must prepare now.
My dear friends, there is one version of the AI story circulating in boardrooms. It says AI will eliminate workers. It says technology will replace human judgment. It says efficiency means fewer people. I reject this story entirely. India must not import fear from the Western world. A country can limit its own future not only by a lack of capability but also by accepting someone else's assumptions as truth. India must build AI not as a force that removes opportunity, but as a force that expands productivity, creates new jobs, empowers small businesses, and gives Indians the tools to compete with the best.
When UPI was launched, many considered it just a payment system. That was too small a way to understand UPI. UPI did not simply move money from one account to another. It moved trust into the hands of ordinary Indians. It made a street vendor digitally visible. It made a small merchant instantly payable. It transformed the mobile phone from a communication device into an economic instrument. Once trust became instant, commerce became instant. Once payments became frictionless, new markets became viable. Once ordinary Indians entered the digital economy, entirely new business models became possible. From that infrastructure emerged a new generation of companies: Flipkart, Paytm, Ola, Swiggy, Meesho, Zomato, PhonePe, and many more. Markets that were invisible became visible. Customers who were underserved became reachable. Needs became new enterprises.
AI will do the same, but at a far greater scale. It will create companies we cannot yet name. It will create business models we cannot yet define. It will create markets that today are invisible. But to understand where these companies will emerge, we must understand the AI economy in a simpler way. There are three primary layers of AI. First, the power layer. AI begins with energy. Without reliable, affordable, and scalable power, there is no processing, storage, or networking. Second, the compute layer. This includes data centers, chips, GPUs, servers, cooling systems, and networks. These are the factories of the intelligence age. Third, the application layer. AI reaches farmers, doctors, teachers, manufacturers, logistics companies, small businesses, banks, consumers, and citizens. Power creates compute. Compute creates intelligence. Intelligence creates new businesses. This is the new AI stack.
And this is where we must be clear. AI is not just software. AI is infrastructure. AI is energy. AI is cooling. AI is chips. AI is networks. AI is data. AI is talent. AI is governance. For too long, digital worlds have been treated as places without a map. But in this fractured age, we must realize that data and compute must have a home, and intelligence must have a geography. If our data is processed on a distant server, it means our future is being written on a foreign server. And it is here that the old world and the new world clash most sharply.
Let us talk about an example. India's IT services giants built something genuinely great: employment, capability, confidence, and global respect. They placed India at the center of the global technology economy. But that model was built on writing code for other people's platforms, on serving intelligence rather than owning it. The AI age does not reward that model. It rewards those who own the data, those who own the compute, those who own the models, those who build the platforms on which the world runs. The old IT model wrote code for the world. The new model must build intelligence. Every generation must expand beyond the success of the previous one. This is not a criticism of Indian IT. It is a call to action and the logic of this very moment.
My dear friends, allow me to share where the Adani Group stands in this mission. We are builders. And in the intelligence age, building means creating the physical foundations on which the digital future will stand. The first foundation is energy, because there can be no AI without compute, and there can be no compute without data centers, and there can be no data centers without reliable and affordable power. At Khavda in Gujarat, we have already commissioned 35% of what will become the world's largest single-site renewable energy plant—a 30-gigawatt project that will fundamentally alter India's energy geography. Our total commitment towards the energy transition stands at $100 billion, making us one of the largest clean energy investors anywhere in the world.
The second foundation is data centers. Across India, we are constructing large-scale integrated data center campuses. We, in partnership with Google, are building in Visakhapatnam the country's largest gigawatt-scale campus. This is a multi-billion-dollar commitment to sovereign compute on Indian soil. Microsoft is an equally strong partner in our data center mission. Companies like Flipkart and Uber are also anchoring their data requirements with the Adani Group. And at the recent AI summit, we announced yet another $100 billion commitment to the data center business. This is a statement of intent. India must not rent the infrastructure of its intelligence future. India must build it. India must power it. India must own it on its own soil.
But the third foundation is the most important: our people. The intelligence age will not be built only by servers, chips, and algorithms. It will be built by electricians, technicians, operators, safety officers, skilled engineers, grid managers, data center teams, and millions of young Indians who will maintain the physical infrastructure behind the digital world. Through the Adani Foundation, we have made a long-term commitment of ₹60,000 crore towards education, healthcare, skilling, and community development. A growing share of this effort is being directed towards AI-generated, AI-integrated skilling. This is what we mean when we speak of helping build India's AI spine. Because the real measure of AI will not be how many jobs it replaces. The real measure will be how many Indians it empowers.
My dear friends, I have spent my life constructing things that did not yet exist in places that were not yet ready. Ports where there were only marshlands. Power in a place that knew only darkness. Infrastructure where many saw only impossibility. And if there is one lesson I have learned, it is this: the future does not come to you. It is built by you.
So let us build. Let us build for the farmer who has always known his land but never had the tools to fully read it. Let us build for the nurse who has always had the instinct but never had the instrument. Build for the teacher in a school without a library who may soon have the world's knowledge in her hands. Let us build for the small manufacturer who has the skill and intelligence to compete globally. Let us build for the welder, the technicians, the electricians, the operators, and the millions of invisible hands that hold our country together every single day. These are the people of Bharat that AI must be built to serve.
The next battle will not be fought only at our borders. It will be fought on our grids, our data centers, our factories, our classrooms, our laboratories, and our minds. And freedom will mean capability. Capability to power ourselves. Capability to compute ourselves. Capability to dream for ourselves. It begins here. It begins now. And it begins with us. Thank you.
