February 2026 | N Chandrasekaran
AI is the next big infrastructure. It is the infrastructure of intelligence. It will have a very profound impact, exactly the same way in the past other infrastructure changes have done — steam engines, electricity or the internet,” N Chandrasekaran, Chairman, Tata Sons, said in his address at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 attended by hon'ble Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi and a host of world and business leaders.
Step into the AI Decade: Full text of Mr Chandrasekaran’s address.
It is an extraordinary privilege to be here this morning and participate in this AI summit.
India is a nation of AI optimists.
Our enthusiasm is not surprising. Indians have witnessed the hugely ambitious digital infrastructure programmes and what they can achieve — the largest digital identity system in the world, covering 1.4 billion people; a digital payment interface that accounts for half of the entire world's transactions.
Over the past few years, under our Honourable Prime Minister’s vision, India has treated AI as a strategic national capability, aligning the full stack from chips to systems to energy and to applications. Through Semicon India and the IndiaAI Mission and, most importantly, the recent reforms such as the SHANTI Act for clean energy, we are building AI at scale with trust, resilience, and long-term competitiveness.
AI is a foundational technology that cuts across all industries.
AI is nothing artificial. It is real because it learns from data and learns faster every day. And it is not based on any fixed rules.
Third, AI can scale, and it scales pretty rapidly.
Our mission should be to make AI work for every individual and every citizen in this country. We should put the AI tools in the hands of the last person in the country and, in fact, on the earth.
Putting all this together, AI to my mind is the next big infrastructure. It is the infrastructure of intelligence. It will have a very profound impact, exactly the same way in the past other infrastructure changes have done — steam engines, electricity or the internet.
Our mission should be to make AI work for every individual and every citizen in this country. We should put the AI tools in the hands of the last person in the country and, in fact, on the earth. That's the vision that we should all work towards.
Couple of days ago, we witnessed 1,500 rural women here in Bharat Mandapam, who had no background to computing, no background to digital tools — in a matter of few hours — could learn AI, could build products, could build marketing materials, campaigns, all in front of a global audience. And they did it in 4 hours.
AI will have huge impact on our public services delivery. It will have huge impact on enterprises around the world.
Since I come from the background of IT industry, one word for the IT industry. It is, in my opinion, the biggest opportunity for the tech sector and the IT industry, because the IT industry's real value is the context: An understanding of every enterprise’s business and technology landscape and make the right technology work inside the processes and the ecosystem, the supplier, customer and all the other connections an enterprise has. AI will expand that role much further. It is the opportunity to integrate AI and AI agents into workflows, reimagine processes and make it work and carry out the transformation so that every enterprise can realise the moat and realise its vision.
Now, I want to talk a little bit about the Tata Group.
At the Tata Group, we are adopting AI across the stack — from silicon to systems to AI-ready data centres to applications and AI agents. And we believe such a vision and such a journey is going to be extremely exciting, and it will require us to work with world-leading partners in India and across the globe.
I would like to make five points.
The Tata Group is establishing India’s first large-scale AI-optimised data centres — purpose-built for the next-generation AI training and inference. I'm very happy to announce that we have partnered with OpenAI to build the first 100MW capacity, which will scale to 1GW.
And we made an announcement with AMD yesterday where we will combine the world-class AI rack architecture with Tata’s strength in infrastructure, engineering, power, and solution capabilities to create a sustainable, high-density AI capacity in India for global standards.
The third, we are already building an AI Data Insights platform. Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw articulated the layers of data architectures. What we are building is totally based on diverse Indian data assets on top of the foundational models — so intelligence becomes available across the diversity of Indian contexts.
The fourth, TCS and Tata Communications together, we are building an AI operating system for industries. What we will do is to build agentic industry solutions for every industry. We are already well on that journey, and we will work with partners to launch it and take it to all enterprises around the globe.
At the Tata Group, we are adopting AI across the stack — from silicon to systems to AI-ready data centres to applications and AI agents. And we believe such a vision and such a journey is going to be extremely exciting.
And finally, again I want to thank the vision of our Prime Minister, which made it possible for us to make a serious foray into chips and semiconductors.
What we will do next is to build chips that are very domain centric, which will be totally AI optimised for every industry, and we will first launch or work towards getting it ready for the automotive sector. So, these are the areas that we are focused on.
I think it is the time for promise to take action into practice so that we can deliver prosperity.
Finally, in conclusion, I just want to say that we are standing here at a very defining moment. It is the age of abundant intelligence, where the scarce resources are trust, stewardship, and human capability.
So, let us set out a simple standard for the AI decade: capability with dignity, high impact for every watt of energy, and progress with agency and collaboration.
Thank you all very much.
N Chandrasekaran, Chairman, Tata Sons
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