'India Wants Data Sovereignty And We're Delivering It': Microsoft's Puneet Chandok On The $17.5 Billion India Commitment - The Times Of India

By Abhinav Kaustubh
Publication Date: 2026-02-18 07:06:00

Microsoft’s Puneet Chandok sits down with TimesofIndia.com to unpack the company’s $17.5 billion India commitment—its largest in Asia. From sovereign cloud infrastructure and in-country data processing to India’s transition from DPI to “AI PI,” Chandok lays out why five factors—infrastructure, capital, talent, policy, and market demand—made India the obvious choice for Microsoft’s biggest bet.

India has made one thing clear about its AI future—it wants to own it. Own the data, own the infrastructure, own the models. At the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi this week—the first global AI summit hosted in the Global South, with 35,000-plus delegates from over 100 countries—that message is impossible to miss. Twelve indigenous foundation models are being unveiled, the BharatGen multilingual AI platform supporting 22 Indian languages is going public, and a Rs 10,370 crore national AI mission is backing it all.And right in the middle of that push,Microsoft is placing its…

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