On a day when India’s unemployment rate stood at 6.68%, according to the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed a $30bn (Rs 15 trillion) investment pledge from AirTrunk — the Australian hyperscale operator majority-owned by BlackRock — as the largest single commitment to India’s digital infrastructure on record.
The numbers were dutifully celebrated. Five gigawatts of data-centre capacity, to be built across multiple Indian states by 2030, would position the country among the world’s most important artificial intelligence infrastructure hubs. AirTrunk’s chief executive Robin Khuda described India as one of his company’s most consequential long-term destinations. Government officials, financial media and technology investors echoed the message in near-unison: India had arrived in the global AI race.
India’s digital infrastructure journey is gathering remarkable momentum.
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 5, 2026
AirTrunk has announced plans to invest around Rs. 3 lakh crore ($30 billion) in India, and develop 5 GW of data centre capacity. This is among the largest proposed investments in the country’s digital… pic.twitter.com/ZW82nneN5x
What those celebrations did not ask is the question that has haunted every phase of India’s neoliberal development model since 1991.
Development for whom?
India was expected to parlay its AI ambitions into mass employment and technological sovereignty. Instead, Mr Modi’s government is rolling out land, energy and political capital for some of the world’s wealthiest corporations — and calling it development.
Strategy: Capital without labour
The data centre has become the signature infrastructure asset of twenty-first-century capitalism — and one of its most misleading ones.
Unlike the factories, railways and public housing schemes that once anchored mass-employment development models, a hyperscale facility requires enormous capital expenditure but a remarkably thin permanent workforce. AirTrunk’s proposed five-gigawatt network across India would require tens of thousands of workers during construction. Once operational, the entire infrastructure could function with a few thousand highly specialised employees managing servers, cooling systems, cybersecurity operations and maintenance.
This is not a secondary consideration. It is the central one.
India does not suffer from a shortage of investment capital alone. It suffers from a structural inability to absorb the millions of educated young people entering its labour market each year. The AI economy’s defining characteristic is precisely that it generates extraordinary productivity gains while systematically reducing demand for labour. Data centres are the factories of this economy, but they are not designed to employ workers at scale.
They are designed, in many applications, to replace them.
Mr Modi’s government has framed the AirTrunk announcement as proof of India’s rising strategic weight in global technology supply chains. What it more precisely demonstrates is a development model that privileges the infrastructure requirements of global capital over the employment requirements of Indian citizens — and markets the former as a solution to the latter.
Economic impact: Land, power and consequences
The social costs of India’s data centre expansion are already visible — and they are not evenly distributed.
In Andhra Pradesh, Google’s proposed AI hub has triggered protests over land acquisition affecting Dalit communities. Local residents have accused authorities of attempting to repurpose land originally distributed to historically marginalised groups — land gained after generations of exclusion, now under pressure for server farms designed to power the computational ambitions of some of the world’s most profitable corporations. Google is pursuing this expansion alongside the Adani Group, the port-to-power conglomerate most closely associated with Mr Modi’s political economy. Adani and Google have jointly announced plans for what they describe as India’s largest data-centre campus in Visakhapatnam. Google has separately committed $15bn towards India’s AI ecosystem.
The pattern is consistent.
Public land, political access and state infrastructure are being mobilised in service of private capital. The communities expected to make way are among the country’s most vulnerable. The benefits and burdens are not being shared equitably.
The environmental implications compound the problem. Data centres consume electricity continuously — 24 hours a day, seven days a week. AI workloads are particularly energy-intensive. At high utilisation rates, AirTrunk’s proposed capacity could consume electricity equivalent to that used by entire mid-sized countries. Every unit of power directed towards hyperscale clusters is a unit unavailable for public housing, healthcare, transportation or manufacturing. India is already among the world’s largest carbon emitters. The decision to prioritise AI infrastructure over other energy demands is a political choice — one that the Modi government has largely avoided subjecting to democratic scrutiny.
The assumption built into official policy is that attracting global technology capital automatically advances the national interest. That assumption remains, as yet, largely untested.
Geopolitics: Data colonialism and ownership question
The AirTrunk investment must also be situated within the broader geopolitical contest over artificial intelligence.
The United States, China and the European Union are all racing to secure computing capacity. Data centres have become strategic assets comparable to ports, energy grids and rail networks. India’s size, its relatively inexpensive technical workforce and its position within Indo-Pacific supply chains make it an attractive destination for that competition.
But strategic attraction and strategic benefit are not the same thing.
For much of the 20th century, developing countries supplied raw materials to industrial powers. In the 21st, many risk supplying something structurally analogous: digital infrastructure. Land is acquired, natural resources consumed, energy systems expanded, and foreign capital captures a substantial share of the value generated. The resulting infrastructure may be physically located in India, but the economic value created by AI models, cloud platforms and digital services flows, in large part, elsewhere. This dynamic has been described with increasing precision by scholars and critics as data colonialism.
Under this model, India risks becoming indispensable to the global infrastructure of artificial intelligence while remaining peripheral to its ownership. Mr Modi’s government shows no visible discomfort with that arrangement. A $30bn announcement generates political capital. It boosts market sentiment and strengthens the image of India as an emerging technological power. The harder questions — who controls the platforms, who holds the intellectual property, who captures the profits — are not asked in the press conferences.
Geopolitical competition, moreover, provides its own insulation against scrutiny. Once a project is framed as essential to technological sovereignty or national security, concerns about displacement, labour rights and environmental sustainability can be dismissed as obstacles to progress. India’s AI ambitions, articulated through events such as the Global IndiaAI Summit, have provided exactly that framing — a nationalist wrapping for a fundamentally transnational capital accumulation process.
Corporate benefits appear as national triumph
The story of AirTrunk’s investment in India is not, at its core, about servers or gigawatts. It is about a government that has perfected the art of presenting corporate benefit as national triumph. The primary winners of a $30bn hyperscale data centre network are cloud-computing providers, AI developers and the investors who back them — not the unemployed graduate in Bihar, the displaced Dalit farmer in Andhra Pradesh or the precarious gig worker in Mumbai. Digital infrastructure matters; countries cannot opt out of artificial intelligence. But acknowledging that reality does not require accepting every corporate narrative about development as fact. The question is not whether India needs data centres. The question is who pays for them, who profits from them, and who is asked — without being consulted — to bear their cost.
East Post is an independent geopolitical analysis portal covering South Asia and global power dynamics for international audiences. Views expressed are analytical and do not constitute endorsement of any state or non-state actor.
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