Mint Primer: Why top tech executives are heading for India
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Last week, Yann LeCun, one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence (AI), visited India. Alongside, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang made his annual visit.
On 6 November, celebrated inventor Mustafa Suleyman is expected. What do these visits tell us about India and its economy? India is involved in most discussions on a global AI policy. The Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) Summit, which followed India’s G20 presidency, and preceded this year’s Bletchley Declaration, is a good example.
India has the second-largest developer base in the world after the US at about 13.2 million. With vast sections of the world’s developer ecosystem either based in India or originating in the region, a concerted effort from the Centre is pushing Indian firms to build foundational technologies. Global enterprises, therefore, want to tap India to co-create intellectual properties in tech.
Read more: A Reliance-Nvidia tie-up brightens India’s AI success odds It has. The boom in outsourcing tech services firms since the 1990s brought India to the global technology map. At the time, India emerged as an attractive destination thanks to cheap labour, ample availability of skilled engineers, and the government’s interest in enabling more tech operations in the country.
This reflected in Microsoft founder Bill Gates’ India visit in March 1997, Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s visit to the country in October 2004, and more. Each of these phases have marked the scaling-up of India’s importance to the US-led world of technology. Oracle founder Larry Ellison was in India in September this year.
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