• The Chairman of the Adani Group said energy security and digital security are now the twin foundations of national power.
• He called for India to build sovereign capabilities across the artificial intelligence(AI) stack, from energy and data centres to compute and applications.
• He said India must build AI as a force that expands productivity, creates jobs and strengthens national capability.
Mr Gautam Adani, Chairman of the Adani Group, today said the world is entering a new geopolitical era where energy, intelligence and compute infrastructure will define national power, economic resilience and strategic influence.
Addressing the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Annual Business Summit 2026 in New Delhi, Mr Adani said the assumptions that shaped the past three decades of globalisation are being fundamentally rewritten.
“The world that is emerging is not flat. It is fractured and contested,” he said. “Semiconductors have become instruments of statecraft. Data is being treated as a national resource. Clouds are being weaponised. And Artificial Intelligence is being built behind the protective walls of data centres.”
Referring to recent geopolitical conflicts and infrastructure disruptions, Mr Adani said energy security and digital security are now “the twin pillars of national power.”
“The country that controls its energy will power its industrial future. The country that controls its compute will power its intelligence future. And the country that controls both will shape the century ahead,” he said.
“India must not rent the infrastructure of its intelligence future. India must build it, power it and own it on its own soil.”
Mr Adani said AI must not be viewed merely as software, but as infrastructure built on energy, compute, networks, data centres, chips, talent and applications.
“For too long, digital worlds have been treated as places without a map,” he said. “But in this fractured age, we must realise that data has a home and intelligence has a geography. If our data is processed on distant shores, our future is being written in a language we do not own.”
Turning to India, Mr Adani said the country’s scale of demand across manufacturing, mobility, logistics and digital consumers gives it a unique opportunity to build world-scale infrastructure with demand already embedded into the economy.
He noted that India has crossed 500 gigawatts (GW) of installed power capacity and said the country’s future AI economy will require massive investments in energy, data centres and compute ecosystems.
“India must build AI not as a force that removes opportunity, but as one that expands productivity, creates jobs, empowers entrepreneurs and gives Indians the tools to compete globally,” he said.
Referring to the Adani Group’s investments, he highlighted the Group’s $100 billion commitment towards energy transition and digital infrastructure, including the 30-GW renewable energy project at Khavda in Gujarat and partnerships with Google and Microsoft across India’s emerging sovereign compute ecosystem.
Reflecting on his own journey, Mr Adani said he had spent decades building in places many considered impossible, “from ports where there were only marshlands to power projects in regions that knew only darkness.”
“The future does not arrive. It is built,” he said.
He added that the next freedom struggle “will be fought in our grids, our data centres, our factories, our classrooms, our laboratories and our minds,” and that freedom in the intelligence age will mean “the capability to power ourselves, compute for ourselves and dream for ourselves.”
