When the world talks about Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is not merely discussing a technological breakthrough. At its core, AI raises fundamental political questions: Who holds power? Who controls knowledge? And who will shape the future of the global economy? Every major technological revolution has reshaped the balance of power in the world. The Industrial Revolution strengthened European imperialism. The oil economy gave a handful of nations enormous geopolitical influence as the Old boss. Today, Artificial Intelligence and digital infrastructure are assuming a similar role in determining economic and political power as the new boss.
During the colonial era, the land, natural resources, and labor of the Global South were used to fuel the growth of global capitalism. While the form of extraction has changed, its underlying logic remains remarkably similar. Data, computing power, cloud infrastructure, semiconductor technology, and intellectual property have become the strategic resources of the twenty-first century.
India, Africa, and other developing regions possess some of the world's largest digital populations and fastest-growing internet markets. The data generated by billions of people has become the foundation upon which modern AI systems are built. Yet the value created from that data, along with the authority to govern its use, remains concentrated in a small number of corporations and technologically dominant states.
Across India and Africa, massive data centers, cloud campuses, and digital infrastructure projects are being promoted as symbols of development and modernization. However, an important question is often overlooked: whose interests do these systems ultimately serve?
Land, electricity, water, and local resources are deployed to support these facilities. Yet ownership, patents, technical expertise, and the overwhelming share of profits frequently remain concentrated in corporate headquarters located elsewhere. As a result, many countries risk becoming suppliers of digital raw materials rather than centers of innovation and value creation.
India generates nearly 20% of the world's data but hosts only 3% of global data centre capacity. To become an AI superpower, conglomerates such as Reliance and Adani have announced investments exceeding $210 billion in AI-ready digital infrastructure. But behind the promise of technological progress lies an enormous and often overlooked cost: water. A single 100-megawatt data centre consumes roughly 20 lakh litres of water every day—enough to meet the daily needs of about 6,500 households. Most Indian facilities rely on evaporative cooling systems, where water absorbs heat from servers and nearly 80% of it is lost through evaporation. According to Karnataka IT Minister Priyank Kharge, every megawatt of data centre capacity requires around 25 million litres of water annually. With India's current operational capacity of 1.5 gigawatts, data centres already consume an estimated 37.5 billion litres of water every year, even before the sector's planned six-fold expansion.
As AI expands, India faces a fundamental question: should scarce water sustain communities, farms, and ecosystems—or cool the servers powering the digital economy for MNCs?
The rapid expansion of the AI ecosystem and the concentration of power within it are not simply the result of market forces or technological merit. AI dominance is shaped by access to capital, research funding, computing infrastructure, technology standards, and political influence. These factors determine who can innovate, whose innovations are recognized, and who is excluded from the technological future. As a result, the priorities of a handful of corporations and powerful states increasingly become the standards that shape the world.
Today, much of the global conversation on AI is framed as a strategic competition between the United States and China but the real question is not which superpower develops the most advanced model. But, the more important question is whether the capacity to create, control, and govern transformative technologies will remain concentrated in a few centres of power ? or become accessible to societies across the world?
For AI to become a tool of human progress, its benefits, opportunities, and governance must be distributed more broadly. Otherwise, it risks becoming the foundation of a new form of digital domination—one that does not merely reflect existing inequalities, but institutionalizes them for generations to come. The future of AI is therefore not only a technological question but also a question of democracy, sovereignty, and equality.
