India’s Rs 10,000 crore AI mission fund akin to weekend expense for OpenAI: Fractal CEO

Fractal Analytics founder Srikanth Velamakanni said India’s Rs 10,000 crore artificial intelligence (AI) mission is equivalent to a weekend of expenses for a company like OpenAI, and we need to have greater ambition during a panel discussion at the ET AI Awards 2025 on Thursday.


“We need greater ambition,” said Velamakanni. “A Rs 10,000 crore AI mission is like one weekend of expense for OpenAI. We are thinking too small.”



“We need to build an ‘India Model’—like we did with Aadhaar and UPI—and make it available to 1.4 billion people. The feedback from that data would allow us to leapfrog other countries toward AGI,” he added.


Velamakanni was part of a panel with Neysa founder and chief executive Sharad Sanghi and Naveen Tewari, cofounder and chief executive, InMobi and Glance, speaking to ET’s Deepak Ajwani.


The panel discussed the AI bubble and the “overhype” around AI.


“AI is such a foundational technology that will change everything that we see today. The AI revolution is solving for intelligence. AI is not overhyped; in fact, it is underhyped,” said Velamakanni.


For the InMobi cofounder and CEO, Tewari, AI is not a bubble. “I think there's a lot of confusion around it. The change this tech is causing is not linear. While it's not a bubble, we don't really know what this could mean in the future. So, I think panic is a very good stage we are in,” he said.


Tewari further said that just automating work is not enough. “Companies need to fundamentally change the way they use AI. That is a harder problem to solve.”


Neysa’s Sanghi said that its neocloud platform is seeing growing demand from AI firms, as global foundational model companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic expand their footprint in India.


“Right now, demand and supply are so skewed that there isn’t enough data centre space to fulfil capacity. The new data centres are all liquid-cooled to cater to AI workloads, because the entire shift is happening from traditional workloads to AI workloads,” Sanghi said while noting that he does not see AI as a bubble.