At the 2026 CII Annual Business Summit, Gautam Adani, Chairperson, Adani Group said the world was entering a new era where energy, artificial intelligence and national security were becoming deeply interconnected. Challenging long-held assumptions around globalization, Adani said, “We believed supply chains would remain stable, capital would move without a passport, and the cloud would have no nationality. We were wrong.” He argued that the emerging world order is no longer “flat” but increasingly fractured, with nations redesigning supply chains and technology ecosystems around strategic national interests.
Energy And Intelligence Define National Power
Referring to ongoing geopolitical tensions and attacks on critical infrastructure, Adani said energy security and digital security are now “The twin foundations of national power.” He added, “The country that controls energy will drive the industrial future, the country that controls compute will drive the intelligence future, and the country that controls both will shape the century ahead.” Drawing parallels with the United States and China, Adani said both nations had pursued different but equally determined paths towards energy and technological self-reliance. While the US leveraged shale oil, natural gas and advanced computing infrastructure, China built large-scale industrial and renewable ecosystems alongside domestic AI capabilities.
Adani said India’s trajectory would not mirror either the US or China, but would instead be driven by its own scale of domestic demand and economic transformation. “Everything we build in India will already have demand waiting for it,” Adani said, pointing to rapid urbanisation, industrial expansion, electrification and the rise of small businesses. He highlighted that India had crossed 500 GW of installed power capacity as of March 2026, with over half of this capacity added in the last decade. He also said India was on track to build nearly 2,000 GW of power capacity by 2047, describing the country’s economic expansion as “compounding national power” rather than incremental growth.
AI Must Expand Opportunity, Not Replace It
On artificial intelligence, Adani pushed back against fears that AI would primarily eliminate jobs. “India must not import fear from the Western world,” Adani said. “AI must be built not as a force that removes opportunity, but as a force that expands productivity, creates jobs, empowers small businesses and gives India the tools to compete with the best.” He compared the potential impact of AI to the transformation brought about by UPI, which he said democratized trust, payments and digital participation for millions of Indians, eventually enabling entirely new business models and startups.
Detailing the Adani Group’s role in this transition, Adani said the conglomerate was investing heavily across renewable energy, data centres and AI-linked infrastructure. He highlighted the group’s 30 GW renewable energy project at Khavda in Gujarat and its partnerships with global technology companies for large-scale data centre campuses in India. “India must not rent the infrastructure of its intelligence future. India must build it, power it and own it on its own soil,” Adani said. Concluding his address, he emphasized that the future would belong to nations willing to create foundational infrastructure at scale, adding that “the future does not come to you — it is built by you.” |
