India Builds Military AI on $60M Budget, Limited Data
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- India allocates roughly $60 million over five years for military AI, far less than the US $13.4 billion and China’s $1‑2 billion annual investments.
- India operates about 150 AI data centres, compared with over 5,000 in the United States, limiting its data‑processing capacity.
- Neeta Trivedi, co‑founder and CEO of Inferigence Quotient, says large archives of UAV video and radar sensor data sit unused and need labelling for AI training.
- Inferigence Quotient and other defencetech startups are testing AI models trained on limited test data and refined with operational data, exploring small‑sample learning methods.
- Apollyon Dynamics avoids foreign LLMs, building proprietary edge‑computing algorithms and a closed‑loop learning system that incorporates field deployment feedback.
- Neuralix launched Project Ekam, India’s first proprietary Defence AI‑as‑a‑Service platform, inaugurated by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh in Dec 2025, focusing on specialised models rather than large language models.
- Shashidhara BP, former managing director of DRDO’s Aeronautical Development Establishment, argues that data from other wars such as the Russia‑Ukraine conflict is inaccessible, so India must develop indigenous AI tailored to its own datasets.
Why it matters: India’s defence forces and domestic AI firms gain a sovereign, secure AI capability, but the modest $60 million budget and limited data infrastructure mean the country lags behind the US and China’s massive AI investments, shaping a slower but more self‑reliant modernization path.
