Ashwini Vaishnaw outlined India’s strategy to transform itself from a global technology services leader to a product powerhouse

Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw described India’s plan to move from being a leader in technology services globally to being a product powerhouse in a number of industries, such as consumer electronics, semiconductors, and artificial intelligence.

“After the success of having five semiconductor units where construction is going on, this year we’ll have our first ‘Make in India’ chip rolled out from the first plant,” Vaishnaw said during his address at the NASSCOM 2025 event. As part of this transition, the Minister disclosed intentions to produce 25 semiconductor products.

With what Vaishnaw referred to as the “DPI framework,” which focuses on computing resources, datasets, and basic models, the government has made significant strides toward developing an AI ecosystem in India. “When we targeted 10,000 GPUs, we got applications for 18,000 GPUs,” he noted, underscoring the enormous need for AI processing resources.

The far cheaper cost of GPU access is a major competitive advantage for Indian researchers and start-ups.. “The price now is less than a dollar, compared to the global standards of $2.5 to $3/GPU hour,” Vaishnaw explained.

Expanding horizons

The Minister emphasized that India’s goals with AI go beyond only creating applications or offering services.“We could have limited ourselves to being a use case capital, being an application service provider capital of the world, but we want to become much more than that,” he stated.

Vaishnaw claims that India is pursuing a complete AI plan that involves building AI research centers, integrating AI education into universities, developing indigenous fundamental models, and producing anonymized non-personal datasets for training.

Another strategic advantage that the minister emphasized was India’s distinct approach to Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI).“Our approach probably will help us stand out in the coming months and years, because very rarely do we find a large public sector data set availability,” Vaishnaw said, explaining how India’s structured DPI provides valuable data for AI development.

India’s technology services sector continues to show strong growth, he said, “We are adding two Global Capability Centres (GCCs) every week.” But he saw that maintaining this momentum required talent.

Talent pipeline

The Minister urged for increased industry-academia engagement to address the talent pipeline issue. “For our industry, for the IT industry, the availability of high-quality talent is going to be a defining factor,” he said, he urged NASSCOM to collaborate with the government to expand programs like “Future Skills” and revamp university curriculum.

He used Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya in Vadodara, Gujarat, as an example, where businesses like Airbus were allowed total control over the curriculum.“Industry knows what it needs,” he said, advocating for replicating this model to produce job-ready graduates.

Vaishnaw emphasized India’s contribution to worldwide discourse on global AI governance.“The big contribution that we have made in the global AI dialogue is that a simple legislation of whatever magnitude, whatever complexity, will not help. It has to be technology plus legislation,” he stated.

The minister also highlighted India’s position that regulation should not stifle innovation. “We should take care of the harm that may be caused to society and control them, but we should not let innovation be stifled the way many other countries have approached the problem,” he said.