Inside India’s scramble for AI independence

India is rapidly mobilizing to develop sovereign AI capabilities after being inspired by DeepSeek's success. The government launched the IndiaAI Mission with $1.25 billion in funding and allocated nearly 19,000 GPUs to support domestic foundation model development. Key challenges include India's linguistic diversity with 22 official languages, limited high-quality training data in Indian languages, and historically low R&D investment at 0.65% of GDP. Startups like Sarvam AI are building multilingual models optimized for Indian languages, while the government selected Sarvam to develop a 70-billion-parameter sovereign model. The initiative represents a shift from India's traditional services-focused tech industry toward deep tech innovation, though debates continue about whether publicly funded models should be open-source.