One of the most prominent builders of India’s homegrown artificial intelligence has issued a blunt warning about where the country could end up if it does not own its AI future. Vivek Raghavan, co-founder of Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, has said India risks becoming a “digital colony” if it continues to depend heavily on foreign technology companies for AI, while revealing that Sarvam is working on a trillion-parameter model it expects to have ready within six to nine months.

Raghavan made the remarks in an interview with the Financial Times, as reported by Hindustan Times on 31 October 2026.

“The big question that we have to ask, in an Indian context, is whether there is a risk of the country becoming a digital colony,” he said.

Free AI, at what cost?

At the heart of Raghavan’s argument is the economics of the global AI race. With the world’s largest technology companies offering powerful assistants at no charge, he believes it is becoming much harder for domestic players to compete on a level field.

“In any other industry, if someone invested $100bn and gave it away for free in another country, that would be called dumping. This is actually what’s happening in AI,” he said.

He also flagged the data question. India is one of the biggest markets for the free tiers of global chatbots such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and Raghavan cautioned that “if you’re a free user, your data is the product.” For a country of India’s size, he argued, strategic autonomy means having the ability to build and run AI systems at home rather than relying entirely on providers based overseas.

What Sarvam is building

Raghavan used the interview to lay out how far Sarvam has come and where it is headed:

• 105-billion-parameter model: Sarvam has developed a 105-billion-parameter AI model using government-supported computing resources.
• Trillion-parameter ambition: A trillion-parameter model is in development and is expected to be ready in six to nine months.
• Voice at scale: Its voice agents now handle roughly 2.5 million to 3 million calls a day, helping businesses talk to customers in regional languages.
• Language coverage: Its end-to-end voice system supports 12 Indian languages, and some of its models cover up to 22.

Founded by Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam focuses on foundation models and voice technology designed for India’s linguistic diversity. In June, the company announced a $234 million first close of its $300 million Series B round, with HCLTech coming in as lead strategic investor.

Beyond India

Raghavan said Sarvam’s goal is to win a significant share of AI usage in India and then take its affordable technology to markets across Africa, the Middle East and other parts of Asia, regions that share many of India’s challenges around language, cost and access.

He was also upbeat about the wider ecosystem. “My hope is that we are at the vanguard of change and there will be a hundred Sarvams in the future. I’m optimistic,” he said.

Why it matters

Raghavan’s comments land at a time when India is moving on several fronts to strengthen domestic AI capacity, from subsidised GPU compute under the IndiaAI Mission to new frameworks for sharing data safely for model training. His “digital colony” framing sharpens a debate that CIOs and policymakers are increasingly having: how much of the country’s critical AI stack, and the data that feeds it, should sit under Indian control. For enterprises choosing between free global tools and homegrown alternatives, the question is no longer only about capability and price, but also about where their data goes and who ultimately shapes the models they depend on.

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