FM Sitharaman invites global CEOs, investors to join India’s growth story

San Francisco: Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman met global CEOs, pension fund managers and other institutional investors here, and discussed the opportunity for collaboration in the domain of energy and sustainability, the Rs 1 lakh crore ($12 billion) corpus private sector–driven research, development, and innovation scheme, and GIFT-IFSC, among others.

In the presence of Finance Secretary Ajay Seth and Vinay Mohan Kwatra, Ambassador of India to the US, the Finance Minister listened to their views on the reforms pursued by the Indian government, and gave feedback and observation on the existing policy framework.

They spoke about their keen interest and commitment for a deeper and broad-based investment collaboration between the US and India and shared feedback on how to further facilitate and enhance the investment experience.

The Union Minister thanked the participants for their valuable feedback and suggestions.

In her one-on-one meetings with top CEOs, FM Sitharaman discussed opportunities in the fields of AI, Cloud and digital infrastructure.

Jonathan Siddharth, CEO of Turing, expressed his desire to see India at the forefront of 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 Minister highlighted policy framework that has been put in place by India for AI, and encouraged Siddharth to explore opportunities for collaboration and fruitful engagement.

Debanjan Saha, Chief Executive Officer at DataRobot, 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.

The minister underlined the steps that the government 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.

She informed Saha about the potential opportunity through the proposed Rs. 1 lakh crore corpus for private sector-driven research, development, and innovation.

In her meeting with Anjney Midha, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram, the minister discussed the remarkable transformation in technology space driven by the visionary leadership of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, suggesting them to explore collaboration across sectors within the domain of AI.

She also met Thomas Kurian, Chief Executive Officer of Google Cloud and his team. 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 acknowledged and appreciated India’s AI Mission, and the trajectory India is taking under the leadership of PM Modi and called for connecting India to the world via land and sea cables. He said that Google Cloud aims to operate entirely on carbon-free energy at its data centres and offices worldwide by 2030 and spoke about upcoming investment strategy that the group is working on for India.

IANS