India faces a growing risk of an AI blackout if it continues to rely on foreign large language models (LLMs), global brokerage firm Bernstein has warned, calling for a sovereign AI stack and an India-made “DeepSeek” to safeguard economic and strategic interests.
Arguing that India “can’t build its AI future on borrowed models”, Bernstein analysts Venugopal Garre and Nikhil Arela cautioned that a strategy built on renting compute for foreign LLMs and earning data-centre rent could leave the country dangerously exposed. In a report the analysts flagged recent US export-control actions, including restrictions on access to frontier models for non-US citizens, as an early signal that AI is shifting from a globally shared technology to a tightly controlled strategic resource.
