Artificial intelligence models are emerging as strategic national infrastructure, and India must build sovereign capabilities through strong public-private partnerships, Sarvam cofounder Pratyush Kumar said on February 28 at the Rising Bharat Summit, 2026 held in Delhi.
Just like in nuclear and in space technologies, we need healthy partnership between private and public, but there is deep national interest. We should think very deeply about how India can have sovereignty across the layers,” Kumar said.
His remarks come as India accelerates efforts to build domestic AI infrastructure amid growing geopolitical competition around frontier AI models dominated by US-based firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Kumar said AI models will increasingly underpin economic, enterprise and national systems, making it critical for countries to develop independent capabilities. “These models are so important that they are geopolitical… most of what we do as individuals, companies and countries will first touch these models,” he said.
Sarvam, founded in Bengaluru, has built its own large language models trained from scratch using in-house data and engineering. The company has released models including a 30-billion-parameter voice-optimised model and a 105-billion-parameter model that Kumar said is globally competitive in its class.
The startup has also developed multilingual speech recognition and text-to-speech models supporting over 20 Indian languages, and is building AI hardware, including smart glasses manufactured in India, to expand accessibility.
Kumar said India has already demonstrated it can build foundational AI models and must now focus on scaling deployment and strengthening domestic capabilities.
“We have crossed the hump of showing that we are in the race. Now it is about building at scale and ensuring India has sovereign alternatives,” he said.
