FM Sitharaman invites global IT companies to explore opportunities in India

San Francisco: Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Monday met several IT industry leaders and invited them to explore opportunities for technical collaboration and investment.

During a bilateral meeting with Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian and his team here, Sitharaman encouraged them to explore local linkages in India for territorial collaboration and to develop tech for India and the world market under the 'Make In India' initiative.

They discussed the transformative evolution of India's digital infrastructure under the Digital India initiative in recent years, positioning the country as a global leader in digital adoption.

Kurian appreciated India's AI Mission and the trajectory India is taking under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He also emphasised the need to connect India to the global network through land and sea cable infrastructure.

During another meeting with Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth, the Finance Minister highlighted India’s policy framework for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and encouraged his company to explore opportunities for collaboration and fruitful engagement.

Siddharth expressed his desire to see India at the forefront of the AI revolution and spoke about working in the domain of AI with India and through Indian contributors to create a sovereign model that can serve as a template for the world, the finance ministry said in a series of posts on X.

Data Robot CEO Debanjan Saha also called on the Finance Minister and referred to India's potential to become an AI superpower and expressed interest in participating in the AI Centre of Excellence, for which the Union Budget 2025-26 recently allocated Rs 500 crore.

"FM @nsitharaman underlined the steps that the Government of India has taken over years to boost digital infrastructure, including budgeting Rs 10,300 crore for IndiaAI Mission, creating AI language technologies through BharatGen and Sarvam-1, and the establishment of the Srijan Centre for Generative AI at IIT Jodhpur @saide_iitj among others," another post said.

The Finance Minister explained to him about the potential opportunity through the proposed Rs 1 lakh crore corpus, private sector-driven research, development, and innovation scheme, and informed about India ranking first globally in AI skill penetration where India is ahead of many developed countries.

In another meeting with Anjney Midha, General Partner with a16z and Raghu Raghuram advisor VMware, Sitharaman suggested that a16z and VMware may like to explore collaboration across sectors within the domain of AI including in education, healthcare, and AI Centres of Excellence.

"Mr. @RaghuRaghuram, former CEO @VMware said that #AI is a strategic infrastructure, and the work India is doing in the field of #AI is visible.

“Mr. AnjneyMidha said that @a16z is working in 16 areas of #infrastructure dedicated sectoral funds across many countries to provide solutions to real-world problems," another post said.

Sitharaman discussed the various facets of India's AI efforts and referred to Digital India programme, ONDC, Financial Inclusion, Account Aggregators, Digital Payment systems, India's National AI strategy, Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), and cloud computing through MeghRaj and spoke about the need to skill and train the youth in the domain of AI.

"FM encouraged @a16z to explore possibilities for collaboration on that front," it said.

Later, Sitharaman had attended a roundtable with various pension fund managers and other institutional investors in the presence of Finance Secretary Ajay Seth.

"The participants shared with FM Smt. @nsitharaman gave their views on the reforms pursued by the Government of India and gave feedback and observations on the existing policy framework. They spoke about their keen interest and commitment for a deeper and broad-based investment collaboration between the USA and India and shared feedback on how to further facilitate and enhance the #investment experience," the ministry said in a separate post.

The finance minister informed them about the opportunity for investment and collaboration in the domain of energy and sustainability, and GIFT-IFSC, among others. PTI DP DR