India has a credible shot at becoming the intelligence capital of the world, with Bengaluru emerging as an easy global recall, chip giant Nvidia's managing director for South Asia Vishal Dhupar has said. The country’s strength lies not in chasing frontier models but in building intelligence at a population scale, he said.
“I feel that the work we are doing here… we are going to become the intelligence of the world (and) Bangalore, EkStep is going to be easy recall when it comes to being the recall for intelligence,” Dhupar said Voice AI-Making the best work for India event in Bengaluru on January 28.
Dhupar, who was speaking to Infosys and EkStep co-founder Nandan Nilekani in a fireside chat, was drawing parallels with how certain cities become synonymous with specific capabilities over time.
EkStep is an NGO that invests in the development digital public goods, including AI.
India's IT capital Bengaluru has emerged as the country's leading hub for AI talent, with the largest number of artificial intelligence-related professionals, a recent CBRE report said.
The city’s talent scale now matches that of global tech clusters such as San Francisco and New York in the US. Bengaluru is also the largest tech talent market in the Asia-Pacific region with more than a million tech workers.
Dhupar added that the global technology shift is no longer about storing information but about generating intelligence. Intelligence is created when applications are embedded into real workflows and operate at scale, rather than through models or tokens in isolation.
He highlighted that the global AI debate is overly focused on the supply side, including who has the biggest or best frontier models, while India’s opportunity lies on the demand side. “Tokens in isolation have no meaning. Tokens in the context of a workflow have meaning,” he said. He added that the real challenge is to deliver intelligence at the scale and cost that India requires.
According to Dhupar, Bengaluru’s ecosystem of builders, startups, and technology talent gives it a natural edge as India’s intelligence hub. As more applications are built and used professionally, the learning curve accelerates, expanding the canvas and attracting global attention.
Talking to Dhupar Nilekani said India’s advantage comes from its experience in building population-scale digital infrastructure, pointing to platforms such as Aadhaar and UPI that operate at low cost and massive scale.
According to Nilekani, voice AI is the final frontier for access to technology. “And even more so in a country which has so many different languages and languages, so many different languages. So I think what we're talking about is the final frontier of inclusion,” he said.
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