The Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India has released a white paper titled “Democratising Access to AI Infrastructure,” presenting the government’s vision to make artificial intelligence resources more widely accessible. The document, created with input from experts and stakeholders, examines India’s current AI capabilities and suggests ways to provide wider access to computing power, datasets and model ecosystems.
In a social media post, the office said, “For India, democratising access means treating AI infrastructure as a shared national resource, empowering innovators across regions to build local-language tools, adapt assistive technologies, and create solutions aligned with India’s diverse needs.” The white paper highlights that essential AI resources should be affordable and available to a broader set of users rather than limited to global companies and urban centres. This approach is aimed at supporting innovation across institutions and regions in India.
The report separates physical and digital AI infrastructure. Physical infrastructure includes data centres, Graphics Processing Units, Tensor Processing Units and other specialised processors required for training and deploying large AI models. While India holds 20 percent of global data, it has only 3 percent of global data centre capacity. Data centres are concentrated in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai, with other hubs in Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi NCR, Pune and Kolkata. Under the IndiaAI Mission, the government plans to expand compute capacity with a secure GPU cluster containing 30,000 next-generation units for strategic and sovereign use.
The white paper also emphasizes a digital public infrastructure approach, which treats AI systems as digital public goods. This allows users to access data, compute and model resources without being physically present. It recommends starting with lighter elements such as directories, metadata standards and access protocols, followed by data access systems, consent-based data flows and a coordinated compute-exchange mechanism. While no formal policies are proposed, the paper provides a roadmap for the government to ensure AI infrastructure can grow and include non-urban areas and individual innovators across India.
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