India, July 6 -- The way India buys AI compute is being rewritten. The acute GPU shortage that dominated the early GenAI boom has eased from its most extreme levels, but the market is still far from relaxed.

Industry insiders say the scramble has now shifted from older-generation GPUs to acquiring the latest-generation AI chips, which remain difficult to source. To remedy this, cloud providers are now moving to reserve capacity months in advance and leaning on mixed fleets of old and new hardware to keep workloads moving.

At the same time, geopolitics, export controls and the concentration of semiconductor production in a handful of regions have created a system in which large strategic buyers are prioritised, while smaller enterprises ...