At the recent White House dinner, Trump sat with America’s tech titans
Data centers are the new factories, and compute is becoming a foundation of sovereignty. India must build its own AI backbone or risk renting its digital destiny from others.
By Vishnu Rajkumar · Marginalia
note · LinkedIn
At the recent White House dinner, Trump sat with America’s tech titans. The scene looked less like disruption and more like a coronation. Founders who once claimed to be outsiders now acting as courtiers. And what’s on the table? Nearly a trillion dollars in data center commitments.
Data centers are the new factories. AI is the product rolling out the door. Whoever controls that chain doesn’t just run companies; they bend the arc of economies, of politics, of people’s lives.
India can’t afford to watch this from the sidelines. Our IT story was built on exporting talent and renting out skills. That playbook is running out of road. If we don’t start building fabs, compute, secure clouds, the backbone of our own AI stack; we risk being stuck as digital middlemen in someone else’s empire.
Nations that treat compute as infrastructure will rise. Sovereignty in this age isn’t about flags or missiles. It’s about whether your data, your compute, your intelligence lives under your roof or someone else’s. The rest will rent their destiny. For India, it’s time to decide which side of that line we want to stand on. More in comments…