India's AI Infrastructure to Boost Southeast Asia Tech Hubs, Not Replace Them

The report from ComputerWeekly cited tech executives at the Gitex AI Asia 2026 conference in Singapore, forecasting India's massive scale to act as a testing ground for the broader Asian market and help other markets build "scale and velocity".

Gorilla Technology Chairman and CEO Jay Chandan rebuffed concerns of India "going to replace Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam", adding the country aims to demonstrate to emerging economies that they "can build these large-scale models, and be successful with an efficient cost base".

"Because India is geopolitically safe compared to many other areas, it has the potential to become a major hotspot for serving global AI demand," Yotta Data Services Co‑founder and Chief Executive Sunil Gupta said.

Gupta added that India's sprawling datacentres solve global supply chain challenges, with more enterprises from Europe and the Middle East relying on India to host their AI training and inference workloads due to GPU shortages elsewhere.

"With a population of 1.4 billion, including a billion smartphone users connected to the internet, India currently accounts for over half of the world's digital payment transactions. This has led to an increased demand for processing and storing data within the country's borders," the report said.

The report highlighted growing concerns of Indian users about privacy and security concerns regarding their data, with the rising adoption of AI in recent years.

"People want sovereign AI and sovereign models trained on sovereign data," Gupta said, calling it "a huge wave in India right now, supported fully by the government".

The government backed IndiaAI Mission that heavily subsidised computing costs, by paying infrastructure providers to allocate GPUs to local model builders, researchers and academia, the report noted.

- IANS