Last week, on a 600-acre site near Visakhapatnam, Google broke ground on what is being dubbed as India’s largest AI hub. The infrastructure partners are AdaniConneX and Airtel’s Nxtra. The silicon will be designed in California and fabricated in Taiwan. The model weights, when the data centre lights up, will be Google’s. India’s contribution is the land, the power, the construction, and the operations. It is a triumph of sorts. Alas, we have done something like this before.

Thirty years ago, the IT-services boom began with a related bargain. India offered low-cost engineering labour, fluent in English, to American firms that needed someone to write and maintain the systems they had designed. The arrangement worked. Infosys, Wipro and TCS came of age. A middle class emerged. A reputation was earned. Indian services climbed the value chain, and the global capability centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad now do genuine research and product work for the world’s largest firms. We were not wrong to celebrate this. But the task was incomplete.

What we did not do was use the proceeds to build the next layer. We did not fund research universities of global rank. We did not raise national R&D intensity from below 1 per cent of GDP, where it has remained for decades. We did not develop deep-tech venture capital, manufacturing depth, or patient state-aligned industrial finance. Korea built Samsung. Taiwan, smaller than Karnataka, built TSMC, which now sits at the........

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