India Strategy: Why India needs its own DeepSeek

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India Strategy: Why India needs its own DeepSeek

22 June 2026

India Strategy

India can’t build its AI future on borrowed models. While renting compute to power foreign Venugopal Garre

+65 6326 7643 LLMs may look like progress, it leaves the country dependent. The recent US restrictions on

venugopal.garre@bernsteinsg.com access to the latest AI model for non-citizens drive home the risk that India could find itself

locked out some day, with its applications trailing those in the US and China. We had raised

Nikhil Arela this topic even earlier but were muffled with noises of “LLM does not matter”. But the recent

+91 226 842 1482

nikhil.arela@bernsteinsg.com development compels us to have a relook.

AI is the next ‘fighter jet’: Technology access has been rationed and controlled in the past,

and a trend emerging in last few years is shattering the “Global” image of AI. It started with

critical minerals & semiconductors equipment, moved to GPUs and now exhibits itself in

the form of restricted frontier models. The recent ban on Anthropic’s latest models for non-

US citizens confirms that it’s no longer an anomaly. As AI moves from a mere commodity

to a tool of strategic importance, one thing is clear: foundational models will no longer

be SaaS products, they would rather be critical resources, becoming the “fighter jets” of

an era where bleeding-edge models will be guardrailed. This will only aggravate further,

with deep implications for India currently trying to convince itself that applications built

on foreign LLMs and earning rent on datacentres is a sound AI strategy. To be clear, we

are not dismissing this approach. There is value in participating in the ecosystem through

infrastructure build-out and application layers. But at the very least, India needs to be aware