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India is no longer just a consumer in the global AI revolution; it’s becoming a crucial contributor, says Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director for South Asia at Nvidia. Speaking at TechSparks 2025 with YourStory's founder and CEO Shradha Sharma, Dhupar said India’s unique scale, digital infrastructure, and linguistic diversity make it the ideal testbed for AI innovation built for the next billion. “Talent is the foundation, but that’s not the end game,” Dhupar said. “We have to serve 1.4 billion people who speak over 22 languages and have their own common sense and sensibilities. That cannot be done from the Western world—it has to be done here.” He argued that India’s digital public infrastructure—UPI, Aadhaar, and the India Stack—has already generated enormous datasets that can power the next leap in AI-led inclusion. “If we can industrialise that information so we can serve not just transactions but bring the 350–400 million people outside the formal economy into it, imagine what our economy will look like,” he said. Dhupar called this phase the “industrialisation of intelligence,” where data centers become AI factories producing intelligence tokens that can be deployed across sectors—from financial inclusion to education and healthcare. The opportunity, he said, is not just in exporting code but in exporting intelligence built for the Global South. He highlighted several homegrown efforts that reflect this promise—startups using AI for precision agriculture, language translation, and rural education. “If 50% of your population works in agriculture, and those farmlands are small parcels, how do you build precision agriculture for that?” he asked, adding that the next wave of AI startups is emerging from India’s hinterland, solving uniquely Indian problems. Dhupar urged entrepreneurs to focus on building infrastructure and clean datasets rather than chasing trends. “You can’t have intelligence walking to your house without the infrastructure,” he said. “It’s our time to build—our time to lead.” In his view, India’s AI story won’t be written in Silicon Valley—it will be shaped in its farms, classrooms, and small towns, where technology meets necessity and innovation meets scale. (Edited by Jyoti Narayan)
