- The minister said India's IT industry has pivoted to AI services, and this will also be a big advantage
- Vaishnaw emphasised that India's talent pipeline and stable policy regime are among its assets
- "India has emerged as the most trusted country in the world, everybody wants to partner with us," he said
Praising the Union Budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, IT and Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said it will help take India's semiconductor industry to the next step and also boost investment in data centres.
Speaking exclusively to NDTV's CEO and Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal on Sunday, the minister said India's IT industry has pivoted to providing AI services, and this will also be a big advantage for data centre infrastructure providers.
To a question on the announcement of the Semiconductor Mission 2.0 and how it differs from the first version, Vaishnaw said it is aimed at making the ecosystem stronger.
"Semiconductor is a multi-year journey. In the first version, our focus was to get the ecosystem into our country and to start this new industry. So, in the second version, our focus will be on the equipment and materials used for manufacturing semiconductors, and making sure that our startups become even stronger," the minister explained.
"We would like to have at least 50 deep-tech startups coming up as part of the second mission. The talent pipeline that we have started developing in 315 universities is substantial. We'll continue to progress that and, of course, there will be focus on other elements as well," he said.
In the Budget, Sitharaman proposed a tax holiday until 2047 to any foreign company that provides cloud services to customers globally by using data centre services from India.
AI data centres, Vaishnaw said, are the infrastructure layer of the artificial intelligence stack and service providers can build on it.
"So far, we have about $70 billion of committed investment and about $90 billion, which has been announced. We believe that, with today's budget announcement, the investment might even go beyond $200 billion. This is because people really look at the talent pipeline in our country and the stable policy regime here," he stressed.
'Multiplier Impacts'
"The Indian IT industry has very nicely pivoted to providing AI services, So that becomes a major strength for the data centre infra providers. We are also seeing multiplier impacts of this.
We are seeing people who want to manufacture AI servers in India, who want to manufacture the components which go into data centres in India, and also people who want to bring, in the coming years, AI chips to India," he said.
On US President Donald Trump's remark that India has agreed to buy oil from Venezuela instead of Iran and the opposition's claims that announcements are being made outside India, Vaishnaw asserted that all policies are decided by the Centre.
"And you have seen how India has emerged as the most trusted country in the world, where everybody wants to partner with us. We have seen it in electronics manufacturing and we are seeing it in semiconductors as well. I recently visited ASML (a key supplier to semiconductor manufacturers) in the Netherlands and requested that they look at India as a manufacturing hub. They have never gone outside the Netherlands. And, within a short timeframe, they are sending a full delegation to India to look at the opportunities here," he said.
