As India welcomes AI investments, it must first reckon with unequal access to water

Every tech giant in the world is interested in building AI data centres in India. Late last year, Microsoft, Amazon and Google committed tens of billions of dollars to doing so. This year, the Adani Group pledged $100 billion, bringing the combined first wave to $167.5 billion.

India is now confronted with a question societies need to field time and again as technologies evolve. It is not whether the country should embrace AI, but on whose terms and at what cost.

Technologies do not arrive as neutral instruments. They come as forces – creative or destructive, liberating or dispossessing – shaped by the interests and ideologies of those who deploy them. The steam engine inaugurated industrial capitalism and facilitated colonial extraction. The Green Revolution fed millions and indebted millions more. Artificial intelligence carries similar epoch-making potential, but India is welcoming it at a peculiarly fraught moment.

The country is simultaneously one of the world’s most ambitious technology adopters and one of its most unequal societies, beset by deepening environmental stress, caste-based discrimination and resource scarcity.

In early 2026, it hosted a high-profile international summit on AI governance, signalling its aspiration to be a rule-setter rather than merely a rule-taker in the global AI order. However, the current trajectory of AI infrastructure...

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