Resilience, Not Replication: India's AI Strategy in a Selective Globalization Era
Recent restrictions on access to frontier AI models have reignited an important debate in India about technological dependence. Much of that discussion has focused on whether India should pursue the Chinese model of technological self-reliance. The more useful question, however, is different: should India aim for replication, or should it build resilience?
China’s technological rise has become a compelling template for countries seeking to strengthen their strategic capabilities. For India, where civilizational pride is increasingly shaping national discourse, that experience resonates because many countries have long depended on the West, particularly the United States, for critical technologies and have consequently become exposed to the vulnerabilities that accompany such dependence.
There are two perspectives that emerge. One is the emotional and national perspective that resonates strongly within India, and the other is pragmatism. Whilst the former is understandable and can serve as motivation to excel, public policy ultimately has to be guided by pragmatism, which may require reconsidering whether a civilizational call to “build everything ourselves” is either economically or strategically feasible.
Firstly, replicating China is not an easy path. It has taken China about three decades to build its manufacturing strength, and even today it continues to expand its capabilities in AI compute while frontier AI remains largely led by the United States and advanced semiconductor fabrication remains concentrated in Taiwan. As stated in my earlier post, ‘The AI Race Is Not What It Seems’, the critical chokepoints are concentrated across a handful of countries, but no single country controls the entire AI value chain. Taiwan dominates advanced fabrication, the Netherlands provides critical lithography, the United States leads frontier compute and foundation models, South Korea supplies advanced memory, while China has rapidly strengthened its position in open-source AI models and is now pursuing a national strategy to expand into chips and compute infrastructure.
The attention drawn by Indian technology captains towards India’s position in the AI value chain is understandable. India today largely participates at the application layer, while much of the underlying compute, frontier models and advanced semiconductor capabilities reside elsewhere. There is certainly a need for India to move into areas where it has stronger foundations, particularly semiconductor design, compute infrastructure and AI models built for the Indian ecosystem, thereby reducing strategic vulnerabilities arising from external dependence.
It may be intuitive to conclude that the era of unrestricted globalization has run its course, particularly given recent restrictions on access to frontier AI models. However, this should not be interpreted as the end of globalization. Rather, globalization has become increasingly selective, particularly in strategically important technologies. Access is now influenced not only by markets but also by national security considerations.
AI is not the only area where this is happening. Countries are also rethinking their dependence on others for energy, semiconductors and critical minerals. The lesson is similar across all of them: reducing strategic dependence does not mean cutting yourself off from the world.
For India, the more pragmatic response is not complete technological self-sufficiency but resilience through diversification. India’s circumstances are different, requiring a strategy built around its own comparative strengths rather than another country’s development model.
India already possesses compelling advantages in Digital Public Infrastructure, multilingual AI, enterprise software, healthcare, public sector AI platforms and engineering talent. It is also investing in domestic data centers that strengthen both data sovereignty and compute capacity. Building on these strengths, while deepening strategic collaboration with the United States, Japan, South Korea and Europe in areas such as semiconductor design, research partnerships, compute infrastructure and advanced manufacturing, offers a practical path forward.
Looking ahead…
Globalization has not disappeared, but it has become more selective. For India, the goal should not be complete technological independence but greater resilience. That means building capabilities in critical areas while continuing to work closely with trusted international partners.