New Delhi, Aug. 18 -- It always starts with the chip. Nvidia designs it. Taiwan makes it. Indian investors watch from the outside, with no clear way in.

But a chip on its own does nothing. It has to sit inside a server. That server needs a building. The building needs power - lots of it - and a fibre line quick enough to shift the data. Strip away the glamour, and what is left is a huge construction job. Steel, cable, transformers, and cooling.

That job - the physical body of artificial intelligence (AI) - is now underway in India. The country ran about 1,500 megawatts (MW) of data centre capacity at the start of 2025.

It should cross 2,000 MW by the end of 2026, and the government expects the cloud part alone to grow four to five time...