India eyes $217 billion AI push, plans sovereign models for strategic needs: IT minister Vaishnaw

India on Tuesday said it wants to develop sovereign AI models to meet “strategic requirements” and weave in contextual nuances of the country as it plans to have localized tech solutions and IPs to counter the dominance of large language models (LLMs) broadly coming in from America and China.

As American LLMs such as Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and those from Anthropic and Perplexity gain ground across the world with Chinese DeepSeek and Qwen also expanding, the govt is keen to have India-specific models that are customized to the country’s needs, languages, cultural nuances, and industry requirements, IT and Electronics Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the India AI Impact summit.