Digital Leapfrogging.
AI is the new 'Digital Public Infrastructure'. Nations are building sovereign stacks to ensure intellectual and economic independence.
AI as a Utility
In India, the AI Mission is treating compute as a utility like water or electricity. By providing subsidized API access to domestic startups, the state is accelerating the transition to an agentic economy faster than private markets in the West.
The India Stack Model
India's approach to digital infrastructure—offering free API access to Aadhaar (identity), UPI (payments), and DigiLocker (documents)—has enabled 450M people to leapfrog traditional banking. The AI Mission 2.0 aims to replicate this with sovereign compute clusters.
The Data Sovereignty Wall
Bilateral agreements in the Global South are creating a data-corridor that excludes Western hyperscalers, ensuring training data remains an asset of the state rather than a commodity for external labs.
The African Union's Data Policy Framework explicitly prohibits the export of raw training data without domestic value-addition. This means Western AI companies must establish local data processing facilities if they want access to Africa's linguistic diversity.
Linguistic Sovereignty
English-first language models perpetuate colonial power dynamics. India's Bhashini Project is building multilingual models for 22 scheduled languages, ensuring rural populations can access AI services in their native tongue.
🇮🇳 India AI Mission
10,000+ GPU cluster for domestic startups. Zero API cost for education and healthcare use cases.
🌍 African Union DPI
Pan-African AI training consortium. Focus on Swahili, Hausa, Yoruba, and Amharic models.
The Talent Retention Challenge
Brain drain remains the biggest threat to Global South AI ambitions. Top ML researchers from India, Nigeria, and Brazil are still recruited by US tech giants offering 10x local salaries.
To counter this, India's AI Fellowship Program offers competitive grants ($200K/year) to retain PhD-level talent domestically. The program explicitly prohibits concurrent employment with foreign AI labs.
The China-Global South Compute Alliance
China's Belt and Road Initiative now includes AI infrastructure financing. By offering subsidized H100 clusters to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Kenya, China is positioning itself as the 'AI Enabler' for the developing world—creating dependencies that mirror its 5G strategy.
Policy Recommendations
- Data Localization with Nuance: Allow cross-border data flows for research, but mandate domestic processing for commercial training.
- Open Weights, Closed Fine-Tuning: Encourage open-source foundation models but protect fine-tuned sector-specific models as sovereign assets.
- Compute Subsidies with Strings: Provide free GPU access to domestic startups, but prohibit immediate foreign acquisition.
- Linguistic Diversity Mandates: Require all AI services operating in-country to support local languages with 95%+ accuracy.