Jensen Huang is back in the leather jacket. Even in the sweltering humidity of a Mumbai ballroom, the uniform remains non-negotiable. He’s here to sell a dream, or more accurately, to rent out the pickaxes for a digital gold rush that hasn’t quite figured out where the gold is buried.

The Nvidia AI Impact Summit wasn’t a press conference. It was a coronation.

For years, India has been the world’s back office—the place where code goes to be maintained and customer service tickets go to die. Jensen wants to change that narrative. He wants India to build the "intelligence" itself. Of course, "building intelligence" is just Santa Clara shorthand for "buying massive quantities of Blackwell chips."

The heavy hitters showed up. Reliance Industries and the Tata Group were front and center, nodding along as Jensen laid out a future where India isn’t just a consumer of AI, but a factory for it. It’s a compelling pitch. India has more data than it knows what to do with and a developer pool that could fill several mid-sized European nations. But there’s a friction here that the slick presentation slides conveniently ignored.

Let’s talk about the hardware tax.

To get this "Sovereign AI" off the ground, Indian firms are writing checks that would make a venture capitalist weep. Yotta Data Services is already neck-deep in a multi-billion dollar deal to hoard H100s. These aren’t just chips; they’re the most expensive real estate on the planet. When a single H100 can cost upwards of $30,000—and you need thousands of them to be relevant—the math for an Indian startup starts to look grim.

The "Sovereign AI" buzzword is the cleverest marketing trick Nvidia ever pulled. It tells national leaders that if they don’t own their own compute, they don’t own their own future. It turns a sales pitch into a matter of national security. It’s brilliant. It’s also incredibly expensive for a country still trying to figure out how to keep the lights on in Bangalore during a heatwave without the local grid collapsing.

You can’t run a trillion-parameter model on vibes and patriotism. You need juice. A lot of it.

Then there are the startups. The summit showcased names like Sarvam AI and Krutrim—companies trying to build Large Language Models that actually understand the linguistic chaos of the subcontinent. It’s noble work. Training a model to handle 22 official languages plus a thousand dialects is a hell of a lot harder than teaching GPT-4 how to write a generic cover letter.

But here’s the rub: these startups are effectively building on rented land. They’re using Nvidia’s CUDA software stack, running on Nvidia’s proprietary silicon, funded by capital that eventually flows back to... you guessed it. The "Indian AI revolution" looks suspiciously like a massive wealth transfer from Mumbai’s balance sheets to Santa Clara’s market cap.

The cynicism doesn’t come from the tech itself. The tech is miraculous. It’s the sheer lopsidedness of the deal. We’re watching a repeat of the cloud computing wars, but with higher stakes and hotter hardware. If you’re an Indian cloud provider, you’re stuck in a brutal arms race. If you don't buy the latest silicon, you're obsolete. If you do buy it, you’re spending your margins before you’ve even found a customer willing to pay for the API calls.

Jensen talked a lot about "democratizing AI." It’s a funny word to use when the barrier to entry is a ten-figure investment and a direct line to a single company in California.

During the keynote, there was a lot of applause for the idea of "AI for 1.4 billion people." It sounds great in a keynote. It sounds like progress. But as the lights dimmed and the executives scrambled for their private cars, the reality remained. The silicon is parked in data centers that require more cooling than a small city, running models that still hallucinate half the time, all while the bill from Nvidia keeps ticking upward.

India has the talent. It has the hunger. It definitely has the data. But as the summit wrapped up, one thing became clear: in the great AI gold rush, the folks selling the shovels aren't just getting rich—they're the only ones who know if there’s actually any gold in the mountain.

Does it count as a national revolution if the entire engine is proprietary and the keys are held in a different hemisphere?