Maharashtra On Track To Become India’s AI Capital: CM Fadnavis

Maharashtra aims to become the artificial intelligence (AI) capital of India over the next four to five years as part of the nationwide effort to increase the adoption of the fast-developing technology, chief minister Devendra Fadnavis said.

The Maharashtra government is working on a new AI policy as it wants to lead the ongoing AI revolution in the country, Fadnavis said at the Nascomm Technology and Leadership Forum on Monday (February 24).

“We want to lead this AI revolution and the committee, a team of business leaders, is working around making a new AI policy. In the AI conference in France, our Prime Minister has actually charted our roadmap into AI. And he feels that India wants to lead in terms of AI,” the CM said. 

This follows Maharashtra IT minister Ashish Shelar’s comments that the state was planning to chalk out an independent AI policy soon. 

Fadnavis further said that the Maharashtra government has enlisted the help of OpenAI-backer Microsoft to train and upskill 10,000 women in AI. “We want every person from Maharashtra to ride on the AI revolution,” he said.

It is pertinent to note that Maharashtra currently accounts for 60% of India’s data centre capacity. As part of its push to boost the AI computing infrastructure and meet the energy demand, Maharashtra plans to grow its power generation capacity to 75 GW by 2030 from 45 GW currently, Fadnavis said.

The announcement comes at a time when the adoption of GenAI is on the rise in India across sectors such as manufacturing, healthcare, fintech and retail. The rising demand for AI has also spawned the rise of new-age tech companies, catering to both B2B as well as consumer applications from healthcare to SaaS.

As per Inc42’s ‘The Rise Of India’s GenAI Brigade’ report, India is home to over 200 GenAI startups that have raised a combined $1.2 Bn+ in funding since 2020.

Over the past few years, the government has also announced several initiatives to further strengthen the homegrown AI ecosystem. In March 2024, the union cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission with an outlay of INR 10,372 Cr spread over the next five years. As part of the initiative, the Centre aims to offer incentives and subsidies to private companies to scale up India’s AI computing capacity. 

India’s GenAI market is currently valued at $1.6 Bn and is expected to reach a size of $17 Bn by the end of the decade. This will further drive the demand for semiconductor chips. 

The government on its part has been trying to woo tech giants to set up electronics and semiconductor chip manufacturing units as well as data centres in the country. The first made-in-India chip is expected to be rolled out this year itself.

Meanwhile, amid the growing popularity of China’s DeepSeek, India is also planning to develop a domestic large language model (LLM) as part of the IndiaAI Mission. The Centre has received about 67 proposals for building indigenous AI foundational models.