India dropped its own ChatGPT competitor this year and the internet has NOT been normal since.
It's called Sarvam AI, it's built for Indian languages, and it's got like a billion people's worth of hype behind it.
For years, every big AI move came out of San Francisco.
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic — all American, all English-first.
India was basically the world's back office.
Coding, customer support, the whole nine.
But now they're like, nah, we're building our own.
India produces more STEM grads than almost anywhere on Earth.
Half of Silicon Valley's C-suite has a chai story somewhere in the family group chat.
Nvidia's Jensen Huang showed up in India talking about chips like he was announcing a new iPhone.
Everybody wants a piece of the world's biggest population with a growing middle class.
But here's the part that's actually wild.
They built UPI — that's their payment system — and now it's processing more transactions than Visa and Mastercard combined.
They sent a spacecraft to Mars for less than it cost to make the movie Gravity.
They landed near the moon's south pole when nobody else could.
A country that used to get tech handed to it is now writing its own playbook.
There's real stuff to figure out — infrastructure, regulation, making sure the boom doesn't just help the top 1%.
And honestly, they should be. **Our take:** India isn't the next big thing — it's already the big thing, and the rest of the world is just catching up.
Final Thoughts
The country that gave us zero and the number system is about to give us the next era of tech.