March 29, 2026

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THE SARVAM MOMENT

DAYS AFTER THE India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, and fresh from the launch of Indus--a conversational interface--Vivek Raghavan enters the meeting with BT in his Bengaluru office in high spirits. The co-founder of Sarvam AI appears relaxed and quietly pleased--the company, after all, unveiled India's first foundational AI models during the summitBut our conversation quickly moves beyond product momentum to something far more consequential. "Sovereignty is important in the long run," he says. "It's not about what we build today, tomorrow, or even 10 years from now. You have to look at the long arc." He is blunt. Without domestic AI capability, India risks becoming merely a consumer in a future shaped elsewhere, a new form of "technological colonisation." That long arc started taking tangible shape at the summit, one of the largest global AI gatherings, which drew delegations from over 100 countries. There, Sarvam unveiled the first homegrown foundational models--Sarvam-30B and Sarvam105B--built from scratch for India's scale and diversity. Designed using a mixture-of-experts architecture for high efficiency, the models sup- port more than 22 Indian languages and have been built with a clear premise--AI must work for India's 1.4 billion people, across languages, voice interfaces, and real-world applications. A mixture-of-experts is a neural architecture that increases efficiency by activating only a subset of experts for an input rather than the entire modelThe ambition is to move beyond elite, English-first AI and build for Bharat. But in a landscape dominated by global heavyweights such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, what will it take for India's sovereign AI push to move from technological capability to sustained strategic and economic relevance? According to the Stanford University 2025 Global AI Vibrancy Tool, India ranks third globally in AI competitiveness, after the US and ChinaTRUE SOVEREIGNTY Real AI sovereignty is not just about building models. It requires control over the entire stack right from data and algorithms to compute infrastructure and hardware. Without making their own graphic processing units (GPUs), countries will remain hostage to export restrictions, undermining technological independence. At the same time, sovereignty is not only about hardware. Only a model trained on domestic, culturally relevant data and governed by local regulations--especially when deployed within controlled environments-- can retain sovereignty over its behaviour, privacy, and outputFor Raghavan, the challenge is best understood as a layered problem. "The most fundamental layer is energy. Running AI efficiently will increasingly depend on power availability, which is why smaller, more efficient models that consume

DIALING UP DIGITAL GROWTH

FORMULA 1 HAS, over seven decades, remained one of the foremost sporting attractions globally. And guess what? An Indian company enables the broadcast of the race to over 500 million fans in at least 180 countries. In 2022, Formula 1 and Tata Communications announced a multi-year strategic collaboration, under which the latter was made the official broadcast connectivity partner of the racesIn under 200 milliseconds, video feeds move from the venue of the race to a remote production site in London, before making their way to the viewing device. This is what media companies do, but Tata Communications is not one. Its network provides international call services, but it's not just a telecom company either. It would be best to describe the company as operating at the confluence of both, in a zone called communication technology, courtesy the 5,00,000 km of sub-sea cables that serve enterprises and internet service providersAll this is enabling the company to bat for a play in the digital space. The high-value solutions it is targeting call for expertise in cloud computing, mobility, security, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and moreCHANGE IS CONSTANT The business model of Tata Communications is not easy to grasp. One reason, among others, is the sheer pace of transformation, from a voice player at the turn of the century to building a big play in data and digital. The company followed strategies in line with what was the need of the hour"One of the reasons we are not understood very well is because there is no other comparable company," says the company's MD & CEO, A S Lakshminarayanan. Before his current position, he had a long stint with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), where he was running markets like Japan, the UK and Europe, apart from being the global head of media and information services. "We have an interaction fabric, a network fabric and a cloud fabric. Nobody else has that, and since each of these has a different profile, one cannot put them on a single spreadsheet." The metamorphosis of Tata Communications has been an ongoing process and has not been easy. Earlier known as Videsh Sanchar Nigam, the Tata group purchased it from the government through a disinvestment process in 2002. Interestingly, difficult situations led to newer opportunities and, inevitably, a different way of thinking. When Lakshminarayanan took charge in October 2019, from a financial perspective, it was a difficult period. Investors were also unhappy. There was nothing remarkable to speak of when it came to customers. "If they wanted five things from us, it was often a case of being able to do 2A or 3B. We were not aiming to solve a problem, and that reduced customer relevance," he says. What compounded the problems was that the meetings were held with the head of networks, not with the chief information officer (CIO)AI-FIRST JOURNEY When a company is in good financial health, other aspects like product, go-to-market and skills can be approached with more confidence and it can make mergers and acquisitions (M&As) more meaningful. Between December 2022 and June 2023, the company made two acquisitions. First was Switch (at $59 million), a live production and video transmission services provider. It then bought Kaleyra, a distressed asset (at $100 million plus a debt of around $180 million) that is an integrated communications platform as a service (CPaaS) player. In December 2025, Tata Communications acquired a 51% stake in Commotion Inc, an AI-native SaaS