Power, compute, and sovereignty: Why India must build its own AI infrastructure in 2026

By Ankit Saraiya, Director & CEO, Techno Digital

For decades, data centers in India operated quietly in the background, built to support enterprise IT, disaster recovery, and early cloud adoption. They were optimized for uptime and cost rather than intelligence or sustainability. As India enters 2026, that paradigm is no longer viable. Digital infrastructure has moved from being a supporting layer to becoming a core national capability, shaping economic competitiveness, technological sovereignty, and the global relevance in AI age.

India today handles nearly 20% of the world’s data yet contributes less than 3% of global compute capacity. That imbalance is colliding with a new reality: artificial intelligence is now the dominant workload. AI is no longer an overlay atop infrastructure; it has become the operating logic of modern infrastructure itself. And AI fundamentally changes how data centers must be designed, powered, cooled, and governed.

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