Adani $100B pledge and OpenAI tie fuel Indian AI infrastructure rally

Shares of Indian data-centre and power infrastructure companies jumped in Asian trading on February 23, adding roughly $4 billion in combined market value across 10 firms as investors reacted to New Delhi’s high-profile AI gathering and a string of corporate commitments.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi used the event to reiterate India’s ambition to emerge as a global hub for artificial intelligence in front of executives including OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Anthropic founder Dario Amodei. Market interest concentrated on capital-intensive projects that promise to anchor compute, power and manufacturing capacity in India rather than on traditional software services, which were under pressure amid concerns about rapid advances in foundational models.

The government highlighted steps intended to lower barriers to compute. Vaishnaw said the administration has “already operationalized a shared computing facility with more than 38,000 graphics processing units, or GPUs,” enabling startups, researchers and public institutions to access high-end computing without heavy upfront costs. He added that “AI must not become exclusive. It must remain widely accessible,” and pushed the development of sovereign foundational models, saying “Some of these models meet global benchmarks and in certain tasks rival widely used large language models.” The government is also scaling AI education and reskilling programs to broaden the talent pipeline.

Corporate announcements amplified the market reaction. OpenAI said it will partner with the Tata Group to build a data centre starting at 100 megawatts of capacity with plans to scale to 1 gigawatt. The Adani Group unveiled an ambitious plan to invest $100 billion by 2035 to build renewable-powered, AI-ready data centres, describing a 5 GW effort that links renewable generation, transmission resilience and compute capacity into a single platform. “Unlike conventional data center expansions, the program is designed as a unified energy-and-compute ecosystem, where generation, grid resilience and high-density processing capacity are developed in parallel,” the company said.

Adani has projected that its investment could trigger an additional $150 billion across server manufacturing and sovereign cloud platforms, helping to create what the company described as a $250 billion AI infrastructure ecosystem over the decade. Adani Enterprises was the top gainer on the benchmark index, closing 2.7% higher as investors priced the scale of the commitment.

Analysts framed data-centres as India’s most direct path into the global AI supply chain. “AI-ready data centres would be a critical nerve centre of the AI-driven environment and it's natural that large groups with deep pockets will get future-ready by setting up such data centres,” said Ambareesh Baliga, an independent market analyst. Industry commentators hailed the scale of announcements as a signal of serious infrastructure commitment; Sarbjeet Johnal, founder at Stackpane, called it “a much-needed announcement from India to show the seriousness of AI infrastructure buildout.”

The shift has built winners and losers. Investors piled into power producers, equipment suppliers and developers while traditional software and services stocks such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services faced selling pressure as market participants weighed the prospect that advanced models from companies like Anthropic could disrupt productivity-linked services.

Key details remain to be disclosed: full timelines and financing terms for the OpenAI‑Tata data centre, the breakdown and contractual basis for Adani’s $100 billion plan, the roster of the 10 companies that together added $4 billion in market value, and formal attribution for Vaishnaw’s remarks. Regulators and policymakers will also need to balance the economic lift from large-scale infrastructure with risks around concentration of compute, workforce disruption and energy demand as projects scale.