Wedoany.com Report on Feb 7th, Recently, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang stated that artificial intelligence and data center construction will replicate the success of the internet in India, creating a large number of job opportunities and driving economic growth. He made this statement following the announcement of India's new budget, emphasizing the potential and strategic opportunities India possesses in the AI era.
Huang pointed out that NVIDIA has already made significant investments in India and is collaborating with multiple local companies. He expressed hope that India will not only attract data center companies to set up operations but also nurture domestic companies to participate in the construction. "Building a data center could require thousands of various professionals, including electricians, plumbers, construction workers, as well as network engineers, system administrators, and software developers," he further noted. "Technology infrastructure has a significant upstream and downstream ripple effect. Looking back at India's internet development, it not only spurred the boom in the IT services industry but also drove job growth across a wide range of fields like e-commerce, digital payments, and logistics. AI is expected to have a similarly profound impact."
This view aligns with the policy direction outlined in the Indian government's new budget. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed offering long-term tax exemptions until 2047 for foreign companies providing cloud services to global customers through Indian data centers. The policy stipulates that such companies must serve domestic Indian clients through local Indian distributors. Officials explained that profits from domestic economic activities in India will be taxed normally, including revenue from resident data centers serving global entities and revenue from distributors reselling cloud services to Indian clients. For associated entities of foreign companies in India, the policy sets a 15% safe harbor profit margin, providing tax certainty for businesses.
Finance Secretary Arvind Shrivastava emphasized during a post-budget meeting: "This tax arrangement aims to ensure Indian data centers can seamlessly serve global entities without the latter bearing additional tax risks. Policy certainty helps businesses make decisions based on purely commercial factors; tax should not be a barrier to technology investment and infrastructure development." Analysis suggests this policy framework aims to position India as a key global hub for data centers and cloud services, attract international investment, and promote the development of the local digital ecosystem.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence is driving urgent demand for computing power infrastructure. Leveraging its vast pool of digital talent, continuously improving internet penetration, and government policy support, India is actively striving to secure a more important position in the global AI industry chain. The large-scale construction of data centers will not only directly create jobs in construction, operation, and maintenance but also indirectly stimulate the development of related industries such as power, cooling, and cybersecurity. It will also foster new cloud- and AI-based applications and entrepreneurial opportunities, thereby generating a compound employment multiplier effect similar to that of the internet era.
It is foreseeable that, driven by both policy incentives and corporate investment, the development of India's data center and artificial intelligence industries has the potential to become a new engine for its economic digitization and job growth.
