⚡️ Transformer: India’s AI battleground: After Sundar Pichai, now Sam Altman makes a big bet
This week, we wrote about the AI battleground that is India, its rare-earth challenge, shortage of a specific kind of engineers (yes, you read it right), and the brewing sovereign cloud war.
Dear reader,
Earlier this week, Sam Altman, who at this point doesn’t need an introduction, was asked what he thought of India’s AI market—even as he geared up to launch OpenAI’s biggest AI model, GPT-5.
His answer: India is soon to become the American artificial intelligence company’s largest market globally, and bringing their products here is a priority strategy decision for the company.
To be frank, this isn’t exactly a major surprise. In May, I got a chance to meet Sundar Pichai. The Google CEO, too, was bullish on India—a stance that the search-engine company has followed up by chasing Indian developers and companies more intensely over the past quarter.
But if you’ve followed the rise of technology in its tremendous nature over the past two decades, you’d remember that not too long ago, India was an afterthought for most major tech companies of the world.
So, what changed? We crunched some numbers, and it seems that even now, when it comes to how much money the American tech giants earn, India is a tiny 3% on average of their net worldwide revenue. However, India has vast numbers on its side—thanks to over 800 million people who today have access to the internet.
Now that AI is everywhere, it only seems fair that Altman wants his team to treat India as an important market.
But then, India also insists that it is building its own AI—in anticipation of an even more polarized world where countries start trying to wean off the precariously balanced global supply chain of interdependencies. Where does that leave us?
Rare-earth complex
A second story about a crisis in the making brings to the fore rare-earth elements—17 metals used to make lightweight, high-performance magnets used in pretty much every car in the world.
To abridge a very long story: rare-earth elements aren’t exactly super rare. But, they don’t exist as independent elements in nature, and are almost always found with other minerals. As a result, the process of identifying, extracting and purifying them, as well as making them industry-ready, is a pretty rare task in itself.
This is where China comes in. Thanks to its advanced supply chain and years of sustained government-backed investments, the country today controls nearly 90% of the world’s access to industry-grade rare-earth elements.
In the initial phases of US President Donald Trump’s tenure this time, the US and China obviously got off to a rather juvenile stretch of tit-for-tat tariffs. While the US threatened China with stifled access to key tech, the Asian superpower retaliated by restricting the outflow of magnets made of rare-earth minerals.
Why? Simply put, rare-earth elements are the perfect balance of lightness, high conductivity, and other factors that general metals, such as iron—a potential substitute—just can’t match. With carmakers looking at them as absolutely crucial, the ball is firmly in China’s court—and as collateral, India too is on the list of countries whose access to rare-earth magnets has been stifled.
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Plenty of space, but few startups
Meanwhile, away from AI, the nascent industry of engineering-led space startups in India is seeing a rather specific issue: finding prolific engineers who become thought leaders and innovators in the long run and are foundational to any venture’s success.
Take Silicon Valley, for instance. Last week, we spoke about Andrew Tulloch, an Aussie engineer who has been offered as much as $1.5 billion by Mark Zuckerberg. Around the world and over time, the ability for companies to identify and hire super-talented engineers has been the major differentiator.
In the space industry, you need such engineers who have a deep understanding of the field—and go beyond the basics to create something striking. But, having such talent requires investments into the education system—universities that support deep research projects and produce engineers who can transform the DNA of companies. India, unfortunately, is at a dearth of that—even as startups say that they’re willing to pay as much as ₹60 lakh for engineers with barely three years of experience, if they’re good enough.
Can we break out of the build-at-scale mentality and create a private space industry with deep-seated expertise? Everyone wants it, but someone will need to push for sweeping changes in the education system and raise awareness and enthusiasm among India’s 1.5 million engineers graduating each year!
The man behind DigiYatra
It’s unlikely that you’ve heard the name Suresh Khadakbhavi, but if you’ve taken a flight over the past three years, chances are that you’ve almost certainly come across his creation.
Now the CEO of the service, a simple ideation session at the Bengaluru international airport—where Khadakbhavi was employed in 2015—led him to offer an idea: my face is my boarding pass. Today, DigiYatra has been used over 60 million times.
Mint’s veteran tech journalist Leslie D’Monte, who incidentally stepped down from his full-time duties last week, spoke with Khadakbhavi for an incredible peek inside what helped build DigiYatra, and how the government-affiliated non-profit is seeking to address concerns around data privacy and the use of personal information, in the long run.
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In other news: Hiring for Apple AI, Airtel takes the Jio route
Searches on Apple’s jobs page now show dozens of roles directly linked to a new team at the Cupertino major, called Answers, Knowledge and Information. Reports about it suggest that this is a new team to work on Apple’s AI efforts across the US and China, with hopes that it can improve Siri, as well as its overall AI offering. Keeping the company’s slow start in the AI race, it’s no wonder that the AKI job roles are being closely watched.
Meanwhile, last week, Airtel introduced its own version of a ‘sovereign cloud’. In simple terms, a ‘sovereign’ cloud will host, process and deliver all your data from within India itself. Demand for such cloud offerings rose to the fore as the world continues to become more divided, and protectionism becomes mainstream. While that’s a story for another day, analysts observe that Airtel, interestingly enough, is slowly but certainly taking the Reliance Jio route by becoming a tech-heavy telecom operator.
If partnering with AI firm Perplexity was the first step, launching its own cloud offering is an absolutely certain second step.