The AI world’s most valuable unpaid intern? India

India is fast becoming one of the

world’s biggest AI user bases.

The question now is how it can turn that scale into superpower status rather than just training Silicon Valley for free.

That will be a tall order for a country largely caught flat-footed by the boom. But let’s start with the basics: The three main building blocks of artificial intelligence are talent, compute (including high-end chips and infrastructure), and data. India doesn’t lack engineers, but it currently doesn’t have

foundational research training at scale

or enough advanced processors at public laboratories and universities. What it does have, in abundance, is data. It should start treating this like a strategic asset rather than leaking it out as a free export.