India will have to scale up to 2 lakh GPUs or more to meet the demand across sectors for computing infrastructure, said Union Minister for Railways, Information and Broadcasting, and Electronics and Information Technology on Friday, speaking at the Rising Bharat Summit 2026.
“We will have to scale up our investment, our compute (infrastructure) significantly. When we started the AI Mission, 10,000 GPUs was the target and we have already allocated 34,000 with another 20,000 being added. I think we will have to go somewhere near 200,000 or more to be able to meet the kind of demand coming up, which is why the recent budget announcement of tax break till 2047 is important,” the minister said. He was referring to the Union Budget announcement offering a 21-year tax holiday to foreign cloud service providers looking to utilise Indian data centres for their global operations.
The move is meant to position India as a global hub for data infrastructure and AI, inviting investments from AI Hyperscalers including Google, AWS, and Microsoft.
On the infrastructure front, the minister added that following Micron Technology’s $2.75 billion Assembly, Testing, Marking and Packaging semiconductor chip plant to be inaugurated officially on Saturday at Sanand, Gujarat, three more commercial production plants are likely to be operational within the year, the last one being in the November-December 2026 time period.
Vaishnaw added that Indian industries will have to be prepared for the nature of jobs which are changing due to the largescale adoption of AI. “We must take it seriously, this is a once-in-a-generation kind of transition which is happening, and we must take proactive action,” he said.
The minister said the primary responsibility for upskilling employees in the technology lies with the IT industry, followed by the state governments when it comes to college-level education and the central government which has partnered with IT industry body Nasscom for the FutureSkills Prime program.
“Almost eight lakh IT industry professionals have been upskilled, but that number has to be now scaled up at a significantly higher level, and that talent pipeline has to start getting created from the colleges onwards,” he added.
First Published: Feb 27, 2026, 18:36
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