India, July 7 -- America switched off an AI model for 19 days. India's answer is a supercomputer in Japan - and a bet that indispensability beats sovereignty

Let me tell you about the least glamorous sentence in Indian tech policy this month, and why it might matter more than any product launch you will read about this year.

In the first week of July, on the sidelines of the 16th India-Japan Annual Summit, the two Governments signed a Joint Statement on Artificial Intelligence. Buried in the paperwork was a memorandum between Japan's industry ministry and India's IT ministry, under which Japan will let Indian researchers use a supercomputer operated by its National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology. In exchange, In...