The Chimera Called AI Hub: The New Face of Tech Dependence and Data Extraction

Across the world, the AI story is turning into one of anxiety – layoffs, restructuring, shrinking human roles. Every other week, Big Tech firms announce massive layoffs – Amazon is set to cut 30,000 jobs, owing mainly to efficiencies gained from AI, while Meta has cut around 600 roles from its superintelligence team. Back in June 2025, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy openly admitted that generative AI will “reduce” corporate headcount as automation scales.

But here in India, the same technology is being packaged as our next big leap forward. The irony is hard to miss. In a country still struggling for labour-intensive growth and equitable jobs, we’re celebrating automation as salvation.

The mirage of Google’s AI hub in Vizag

When Google announced its AI Hub in Visakhapatnam earlier this October, the press releases were drenched in optimism – “empowering India’s future,” “driving innovation,” “AI for Bharat.” Yet beneath that glow lies a more familiar script: a pattern of extraction and dependency that the Global South has seen for centuries.

Scholars Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias call it data colonialism – the extraction of human life as digital raw material for profit. India’s new AI hubs risk becoming exactly that: vast data pipelines feeding Big Tech’s global models. The data of Indian citizens, institutions, and public systems will power algorithms refined and monetised elsewhere. The profits and patents will stay in the global North.

We’re told this is a partnership. But when the chips, servers, and cloud infrastructure are all imported, when the very code is written elsewhere, what kind of sovereignty is that? It feels uncomfortably close to the old colonial pattern: resources flowing outward, decision-making flowing upward.

Digital sovereignty or digital dependence?

The government’s rhetoric of “AI for Bharat” and “digital sovereignty” sounds bold, but the structural reality undercuts it. India still imports almost all high-end semiconductor hardware and relies on foreign cloud services for its data storage. Public sector digitization projects often run on private corporate clouds and opaque procurement contracts. Data governance frameworks remain weak, with limited public oversight.

So, while we speak of independence, we remain tethered to the architectures of foreign firms. What we’re building is not sovereignty, it is dependence dressed up in nationalist language.

The hidden environmental costs

AI hubs also come with physical costs rarely discussed in the hype. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), global data centres consumed about 415 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2024 – around 1.5% of total global demand – and could reach 945 TWh by 2030. The World Economic Forum estimates a 1 MW data centre can consume up to 25.5 million litres of water annually just for cooling, while global water use from data infrastructure could cross a trillion litres by 2030.

Google has promised to invest in renewable energy as part of its expansion in India, which is a positive step. But such contributions will barely offset the strain that these massive AI hubs place on India’s electricity grid and water systems, especially in coastal and drought-prone regions like Andhra Pradesh.

The bihar illusion

The home minister’s recent declaration that Bihar will be developed into an AI hub adds another twist to this narrative. On paper, it sounds like long-overdue inclusion, a chance for an overlooked state to join the high-tech map. In practice, the promise collides with hard reality.

Also read: India’s Schools Are Embracing AI. But Without Guardrails, There's a ‘Hallucination' Crisis

Bihar still battles patchy internet connectivity, frequent power cuts, and low digital literacy. The infrastructure that AI requires – stable electricity, cooling capacity, skilled human capital – simply isn’t in place yet. Building a “world-class AI hub” without those fundamentals is less strategy and more spectacle.And once again, the danger is that such projects will extract value without building local capacity. Data and labour will flow outward while profits flow upward.

Technonationalism and the great distraction

Much of India’s AI ambition could be framed as technonationalism – the idea that adopting frontier technologies is proof of national strength. But when the underlying infrastructure, data pipelines, and decision-making all depend on global corporations, this becomes a kind of theatre.

We celebrate “AI sovereignty” while leasing it from someone else. Hosting is not the same as owning. Collaboration is not the same as control. 

The uncomfortable truth is that our AI strategy risks turning India into a digital colony – a testing ground for technologies designed elsewhere, governed elsewhere, and profiting elsewhere. The colonial script is the same, only the tools have changed.

What real self-reliance would look like

If India truly wants to lead in AI, it must first reclaim its digital foundations. That means investing in public digital infrastructure that is open, secure, and locally accountable, not locked into proprietary systems. It means building an indigenous hardware ecosystem, so we are not perpetually importing chips and servers. Recent developments on the semiconductor front is encouraging but has a long way to go to develop cutting edge GPUs needed for transformers-based AI models of today.

We must make digital and AI literacy a national priority, not just teaching coding, but teaching citizens how AI shapes their work, their rights, and their democracy. We need reskilling programmes that prepare workers for the disruptions automation will bring, and regulatory frameworks that treat data as a public resource. A truly sovereign approach would ensure algorithmic accountability, environmental transparency, and public participation in tech governance.

True autonomy doesn’t come from hosting global tech, it comes from designing systems that answer to the people who use them.

Resisting the new AI colonialism

India now stands at a defining moment. We can either continue being the testing ground for someone else’s AI revolution or we can write our own narrative. Resisting what’s now being called AI colonialism is not about rejecting technology. It’s about reclaiming purpose. It’s about ensuring that our data, labour, and creativity don’t serve distant corporate empires at the cost of local dignity.

If we are serious about “Digital India,” it must be our digital India, not a data colony wrapped in tricolour branding. The future will belong to those who not only innovate but also govern with justice and foresight. Google’s AI hub in Vizag and the promise of one in Bihar may mark milestones in India’s technological journey. But unless we rewrite the rules, they could just as easily become monuments to a new kind of empire: one that doesn’t need armies, only algorithms. And this time, if we’re not careful, the empire will live inside our data.

 Sushant Kumar is assistant professor, Jindal School of Government and Public Policy. He was formerly a fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School. You can reach him at sushant.kumar@jgu.edu.in.

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