India white paper backs AI as shared digital public infrastructure

India’s white paper is one of the clearest attempts yet by a major state to treat AI not as a proprietary race, but as digital public infrastructure. Instead of fixating on owning hyperscale data centres, the paper argues that the real leverage is in governing compute, datasets and models as shared utilities—much like Aadhaar and UPI did for identity and payments. If India follows through, it effectively builds an ‘AI commons’ where startups, small cities and public‑interest projects can tap serious compute and curated local datasets without courting a handful of global cloud providers.

For the race to AGI, this matters because it nudges the ecosystem away from a winner‑takes‑all model. A publicly governed layer for compute and models could make it easier for Indian labs and companies to experiment with frontier‑adjacent systems, contribute safety research, and localise capabilities across dozens of languages. It also sets a template other emerging markets can copy: treat AI rails as infrastructure, then compete on applications and governance. That won’t on its own close the gap with U.S. and Chinese giants, but it could meaningfully broaden who gets to participate in high‑end AI development.