AI will redefine sovereignty, says Jeet Adani at AI Impact Summit 2026

India must move from “importing intelligence” to “architecting it” if it wants to secure its place in the AI century, Jeet Adani, Director at Adani Digital Labs, said on Thursday, laying out a three-pillar road map for what he called India’s technology sovereignty. 

Speaking at the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, Jeet Adani described artificial intelligence as a defining force of the modern era. “Throughout history, electricity powered industry, oil reshaped geopolitics, the internet transformed commerce — and today, AI is set to redefine sovereignty,” he said. 

He argued that the debate for India is no longer about adoption. “Will India import intelligence or architect it? Will we consume productivity or create it? Will we plug into someone else’s system or build our own? The time for asking these questions is now over,” he said. 

Energy and compute as strategic infrastructure 

Jeet Adani outlined three pillars that he believes will define India’s AI century: energy sovereignty, compute and cloud sovereignty, and services sovereignty. 

On energy, he described electricity as the backbone of artificial intelligence. “AI is written in code, but it runs on electricity,” he said, noting that advanced processors generate extraordinary heat and systems falter when power supply weakens. “If a nation’s energy systems are fragile, its intelligence systems are fragile.” 

He said India’s renewable push across solar, wind and storage should now be seen as strategic infrastructure policy, not just climate policy. “Energy security is going to be equivalent to intelligence security,” he added, predicting that renewable clusters will co-locate with AI data centres and that grid stability will become a national priority. 

Turning to compute and cloud sovereignty, Jeet Adani said control over digital infrastructure is as critical today as control over trade routes was in earlier centuries. “Sovereign compute capacity has become strategic infrastructure. It matters where the compute resides, under whose jurisdiction it operates, and who controls access to it,” he said. Hosting critical AI workloads domestically, he argued, is essential to avoid “external concentration” and “national fragility.” 

AI for domestic productivity 

On services, he said AI must first strengthen India’s own productivity, from agriculture and education to healthcare, manufacturing and financial inclusion. “AI must become a force multiplier for Indian citizens before it becomes a margin multiplier for others,” he said. 

Referring to a recent announcement by Adani Group, he said the conglomerate will invest $100 billion to build a sovereign, green energy-powered AI infrastructure platform. The move, he said, marks a decisive shift “from importing intelligence to architecting it, from consuming AI to creating it.” 

“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.”