Digital Independence: How India Is Building Sovereign AI On Its Own Terms | Independence Day Special

Every generation in India has had its defining milestone, and in 2026, the ultimate flex is Sovereign AI: technology built in India, for India, on our own terms. In this Independence Day special edition of Tech Today, we break down India's roadmap toward digital independence.

From managing a national compute pool of 38,000 GPUs and scaling up 2-gigawatt hyperscale data center infrastructure to leveraging over 950 million active internet users, India is transforming raw data into indigenous AI models. We look at how initiatives like Project Bhashini and startups like Sarvam AI and Krutrim are building multilingual, low-bandwidth LLMs, while the nation transitions its 1.25 million-strong engineering talent pool from the world's IT back-office into core AI builders.