Ashwini Vaishnaw Outlines 5 Foundational Pillars of India's AI Mission in Davos

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Wednesday outlined the five foundational pillars of India’s artificial intelligence (AI) mission, noting that the country’s structured and comprehensive approach is earning recognition globally, particularly within the AI industry.

Speaking at an ongoing global summit in Davos, Vaishnaw said the international community has acknowledged that India is advancing in a systematic manner across all critical layers of the AI ecosystem. “The whole world today, and especially the AI-related industry, is appreciating the fact that India is working methodically on all five layers,” he remarked.

Explaining the framework, the Minister said AI comprises five key elements. These include the application layer, which focuses on real-world use cases; the model layer, involving the development of AI models; the chip or semiconductor layer; the infrastructure layer, such as data centres; and finally, energy. He stressed that energy will play a decisive role in what he described as the Fifth Industrial Revolution.

“In the world of AI, energy is going to be a very big factor,” Vaishnaw said, adding that India’s end-to-end approach—from energy to applications—has been widely appreciated by global stakeholders and industry leaders.

Separately, addressing a panel at the World Economic Forum on the “Role of AI in Economic Growth and Global Influence,” the Minister detailed India’s broader strategy to emerge as a global AI leader. He highlighted a shift away from big-tech-dominated resource control towards a public-private partnership model.

Vaishnaw revealed that India has set up a shared compute facility comprising 38,000 GPUs under a public-private partnership framework. This facility is accessible to students, researchers and startups at about one-third of prevailing global costs, a stark contrast to many countries where GPU access is largely controlled by major technology firms.

On the regulatory front, the Minister advocated a “techno-legal” approach rather than relying exclusively on standalone legislation. He argued that modern technological challenges—such as algorithmic bias and deepfakes—require strong technical solutions alongside legal frameworks. These include detection systems capable of meeting judicial standards, as well as mechanisms to reduce bias, enable reliable deepfake identification and ensure proper “unlearning” before AI models are deployed.

Vaishnaw also addressed the evolving economics of the Fifth Industrial Revolution, suggesting that future returns on investment will come from scalable and cost-efficient innovations rather than purely from high-end, brute-force computing. Challenging the perception that AI progress depends solely on expensive hardware, he noted that nearly 95 per cent of AI development can be achieved using models in the 20–50 billion parameter range.

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