Gautam Adani, chairman of the Adani group, asserts that India's true independence in the 21st century hinges on owning its energy and intelligence capabilities, urging the nation to build sovereign platforms rather than renting its future in these critical sectors.
Key Points
- Gautam Adani stressed that energy and intelligence are intertwined national priorities, crucial for a nation's independence and security in the 21st century.
- He highlighted that global powers like the US and China are focusing on energy abundance and AI sovereignty, indicating a shift in global supply chains towards national interests.
- Adani believes India has a unique advantage in building for its own rising demand, projecting a fourfold increase in power capacity to 2,000 Gw by 2047.
- He advocated for India to develop AI as a tool to expand productivity, create jobs, and empower small businesses, rather than importing Western fears of job displacement.
- Adani urged India to build its own intelligence platforms, moving beyond the IT services model of writing code for others, to ensure data and compute have a 'home' within the country.
Gautam Adani, chairman of Adani group, said on Monday that energy and intelligence are now inseparable and must be treated as national priorities, because a nation that does not build capability in peacetime is forced to pay for its vulnerabilities during a crisis.
Speaking in the context of the West Asia conflict, Adani said energy security and digital security are no longer separate dimensions, but twin foundations of national power.
Foundations of National Power
The billionaire industrialist was addressing the CII Annual Business Summit 2026 in New Delhi. "True independence in the 21st century will mean owning the energy that lights our homes and the intelligence that guides our minds.
"This is not a theory. The world's two largest economies — the US and China — have understood this deeply," Adani said.
The chief of the ports-to-power conglomerate cited how the US built energy abundance and is now seeking compute dominance, while China built energy scale and is now pursuing artificial intelligence (AI) sovereignty.
He added that the emerging world is not flat, but fractured. "Supply chains are being redesigned around national interests. Energy has returned to the centre of security discussions.
"Semiconductors have become instruments of statecraft."
India's Unique Advantage
Speaking about India, Adani said the country has "something uniquely powerful because we are not building for an abstract future.
We are building for a living, rising, demanding India".
"India's advantage is simple. Everything we build will already have demand waiting for it," he added.
As of March 2026, India had crossed 500 gigawatt (Gw) of installed power capacity.
Another fourfold increase in capacity is expected over the next two decades, taking India to 2,000 Gw by 2047.
Adani said India is no longer growing through incremental additions, but through compounding acceleration.
"At this pace, India will add the equivalent of a new European economy to its gross domestic product every decade. This is not linear growth.
"This is compounding national power."
The AI Revolution in India
Citing India's mobile data explosion, Adani said AI would trigger a similar surge, but one that would be far more power-intensive.
Data centre capacity, expected to reach 5 Gw by 2030, could rise to nearly 75 Gw by 2047.
"That is why India must prepare now," he said.
The industrialist rejected the narrative of AI replacing workers, technology overtaking human judgment, and efficiency meaning fewer jobs entirely.
"India must not import fear from the Western world. India must build AI not as a force that removes opportunity, but as one that expands productivity, creates new jobs, empowers small businesses, and gives Indians the tools to compete with the best," Adani added.
Referring to the success of the Unified Payments Interface, Adani said AI would have a similar impact, but on a much larger scale. It would create companies yet to be named, business models yet to be defined, and markets that are invisible today.
Sovereignty in the AI Age
Adani said AI rests on power, compute, and applications.
"In this fractured age, we must realise that data and compute must have a home — and intelligence must have a geography. If our data is processed on distant shores, our future is being written on foreign shores," he said.
He said India's information technology (IT) services model placed the country at the centre of the global technology economy, but was built on writing code for other people's platforms and serving intelligence rather than owning it.
"The AI age does not reward that model.
"The new model must build intelligence and can afford to be largely sovereign.
"Every generation must build beyond the success of the previous one.
"This is not a criticism of Indian IT. It is a call to action demanded by this moment," Adani added.
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