Artificial Intelligence has captured global imagination, but behind the glitter lies an unforgiving reality: the AI race is about capital, compute, and it will become about compliance. Training a foundation training model today costs upwards of $100 million, with computer hardware accounting for more than half that bill. Add to this a tightening global regulatory net — the EU’s AI Act, US lawsuits over data scraping, and licensing restrictions on GPUs—and the result is a game dominated by players from the West. India cannot outspend or outregulate its way into this contest. Even if it does outregulate the larger players, this is not an employment-intensive area; it’s more strategic to ensure data as a competitive moat to protect sovereignty from AI.

A new way of looking at the electro-intelligence (EI) stack—the machinery of electrification—offers India a pathway that is not only strategic but economically vital and most importantly, deeply job-rich. This stack includes electric motors, industrial and farm pumps, traction systems for EVs, heat pumps, and the power electronics that connect them with a layer of embedded intelligence. These are physical, real-economy technologies that already command vast global markets and will define the next decade of industrial modernisation.

This is not either an AI or an EI stack argument; this is more to explain that even with the investment in AI, its use cannot be restricted to just the digital world, it has to move beyond the digital to the industrial if it has to generate jobs, competence, and economic security. Currently, the narrative is dominated and hyped by the US GPU manufacturing lobby, which wants the government to buy more GPUs to invest millions and then billions in this race for building LLMs.

Hopefully, we understand that this hype, which is forcing this decision-making, and we........

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