From Tech NAM to NAS: India’s case for tech sovereignty through strategic choices

'Full-stack sovereignty' is a seductive dream, and for most countries, a pipe dream. Only the US and China have anything close to the capital, industrial depth, research base and geopolitical weight required to pursue it at scale. Even they have dependencies. For India, Europe, Japan, Brazil and most others, attempting to replicate every layer would consume extraordinary resources and still leave gaps. A better idea would be non-aligned sovereignty (NAS).

NAS is not technological isolation. It means preserving optionality. India should use the best Nvidia GPUs where indispensable, build indigenous compute and semiconductor capability where strategically important, use Indian models for Indian languages and public systems, deploy Chinese open-weight models where they offer cost and control advantages, and maintain multiple cloud and software options so that no single government or company can hold the country hostage.

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Brazil has just offered an interesting glimpse of this approach. It announced a $444 mn AI investment split across the two technological blocs. One project involves China's Huawei and iFlytek, while another is expected to use Nvidia technology. Brazil is also working on Risc-V semiconductors, a national cloud and an algorithmic-transparency centre. Its objective is not anti-American or pro-Chinese, but to reduce dependence on any single provider or country.

India already understands this instinct outside technology. Its defence arsenal combines Russian, French, Israeli, US and indigenous systems. It can sit in the Quad while remaining a member of BRICS - despite noises from Washington. It can deepen strategic ties with Washington while maintaining relationships with Moscow and the 'global south'. Indian foreign policy increasingly calls this multi-alignment rather than non-alignment, but the principle is similar: autonomy comes from having choices. AI should be no different.

This is urgent because AI dependence can become deeper than ordinary technology dependence. A country dependent on another nation for models is dependent on part of its intelligence layer. If it also depends on that nation for chips, cloud, operating systems and applications, it has effectively outsourced part of its economic and strategic nervous system. Export controls on advanced chips and restrictions around frontier AI access have already shown how quickly commercial technologies can become geopolitical weapons.

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India is doing many of the right things. The IndiaAI Mission is expanding national compute, Indian companies like Sarvam are building foundation models, Bhashini is creating language infrastructure, semiconductor manufacturing is receiving serious policy attention, and enterprises are increasingly worried about vendor lock-in and data sovereignty. But the objective should not be an expensive imitation of the US or Chinese stack. It should be resilience through diversity.

The original Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was born because India refused to exchange political indepe ndence for strategic dependence during the Cold War. AI presents a surprisingly similar choice. In the 20th c., sovereignty meant not allowing another superpower to dictate our foreign policy. In the 21st c., it may mean not allowing another country, or corporation, to control the chips we compute on, the models we think through and the platforms our economy runs on.

India does not need full-stack sovereignty to be sovereign. It needs enough control over critical layers, and enough alternatives everywhere else, to retain the freedom to choose. That's the new non-alignment.