As the U.S. and China compete for AI dominance, other countries, including India, are pursuing Sovereign AI to stay secure and competitive.

• Sovereign AI is a nation's capacity to produce artificial intelligence using its own infrastructure, data, and workforce.

Why are countries pursuing sovereign AI?

• Economic Advantage: AI is projected to generate trillions of dollars in economic dividends and productivity gains, currently benefitting Global North at the expense of Global South.
• Strategic Autonomy:AI is becoming a pillar of economic and military power. Countries don’t want to be dependent on the US or China for foundational AI models and computing power.
• Data Sovereignty: To ensure critical data (citizens’ data, defense, infrastructure, healthcare) stays within national control and is not processed by foreign tech giants. E.g. US based models such as ChatGPT, Grok, etc.
• Cultural Preservation: Sovereign foundation models, such as Large Language models (LLMs), can be trained on local datasets (e.g. dialects, societal practices) to promote inclusiveness and revitalize indigenous languages.

What are the challenges for India?

• Foreign dependency: For technology, components and infrastructure. E.g. silicon chips.
• Funding: To setup large AI factories, a huge sum of money is required both from private and public sector at the initial stage.
• Skilled workforce: India lacks the high-skilled manpower required for manufacturing advance chips and AI LLM development.