Each few years, a second forces a nation to rethink its trajectory. DeepSeek, China’s newest AI breakthrough, has sparked one such reckoning in India.
The query is widespread: “Why cannot India do what China did?” The reply, as Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu places it, is easy: “India can, and it’s not that tough.”
For many years, India’s tech trade has thrived as an outsourcing hub, however international AI management calls for greater than service income.
It requires elementary analysis, long-term funding, and a cultural shift towards innovation. But, when conversations come up about India’s lag in AI, they typically dissolve into blame—on reservations, on governance, on paperwork.
However as Vembu factors out, Chinese language entrepreneurs by no means had it simple both. And but, China is competing head-on with Silicon Valley.
On Reddit, an Indian scholar at a premier institute made a grim statement: “The ship has lengthy sailed.” He argued that China, regardless of being behind on {hardware}, has used aggressive open-source analysis to undermine American dominance. Indian firms, against this, stay caught in low-risk, service-based AI purposes.
“We’ve got by no means caught any bus, practice, and even cycle of the tech revolution,” wrote one other consumer. “All this self-patting is for IT service income. In actual phrases, we’re nowhere close to what the world is attaining.”
The criticism is sharp however not unwarranted. India’s largest companies largely keep away from research-intensive fields. Authorities funding for non-pharma analysis stays scarce. The tutorial system prizes engineering levels over foundational scientific inquiry.
Even at Davos 2025, HCLTech Chairperson Roshni Nadar Malhotra acknowledged the hole: “Indian firms are specializing in sensible AI use instances, however they are not but on the reducing fringe of AI analysis.”
In the meantime, DeepSeek has already reshaped international markets. The AI race wiped $1 trillion from Nasdaq, with Nvidia dropping practically $600 billion in valuation—its largest drop in historical past. The AI assistant even overtook ChatGPT on Apple’s App Retailer within the US and UK.
