Jeet Adani Calls for Energy, Compute and Services Sovereignty at AI Impact Summit

New Delhi, 19 February 2026: Jeet Adani on Thursday outlined a vision for what he described as “India’s Intelligence Century,” calling for national sovereignty across energy, compute infrastructure and digital services to anchor the country’s artificial intelligence ambitions.

Addressing global leaders and innovators at the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, Adani said artificial intelligence would redefine sovereignty in the 21st century, much like electricity powered industry, oil reshaped geopolitics and the internet transformed commerce.

“The central question before our country is not whether we will adopt AI,” he said. “The question is whether India will import intelligence or architect it.”

He structured his address around three pillars.

The first, energy sovereignty, linked India’s renewable energy push to AI capability. “AI is written in code. But it runs on electricity,” he said, adding that fragile energy systems would translate into fragile intelligence systems. He argued that renewable expansion, storage and grid stability should be viewed as strategic infrastructure priorities, not just climate policy.

Adani said renewable clusters would increasingly co-locate with AI data centres and that industrial corridors would integrate energy and compute planning.

The second pillar focused on compute and cloud sovereignty. He said sovereign compute capacity has become strategic infrastructure in the AI era, comparable to steel plants and shipyards in earlier centuries.

“It matters where compute resides, under whose jurisdiction it operates and who controls access,” he said, calling for critical AI workloads to be hosted domestically and for high performance computing access to be strengthened for startups, academia, defence, healthcare and manufacturing.

The third pillar, services sovereignty, centred on retaining the economic dividend of AI within India. Adani noted that while India’s IT revolution established the country as a global digital services powerhouse, much of the productivity gains accrued abroad.

He said AI must first amplify domestic productivity across agriculture, education, logistics, energy, manufacturing, healthcare and financial inclusion before becoming a margin driver for external markets.

Referring to a recent announcement by Gautam Adani, Chairman of the Adani Group, Adani said the group plans to invest 100 billion dollars to build a sovereign, green energy powered AI infrastructure platform for India.

He described the initiative as part of a larger 5 gigawatt, 250 billion dollar integrated energy and compute ecosystem aimed at supporting India’s AI ambitions at national scale.

Calling it a defining moment, Adani said the responsibility of his generation was not to win freedom but to strengthen and secure it through capability and execution.

“The question is no longer whether India will participate in the AI century,” he said. “The question is whether the AI century will carry India’s imprint.”

He concluded his address with a call for resilience, execution and national renewal as India positions itself in what he termed a decisive technological era.