Fin and Me Wealth Partners LLP

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June 20th, 2026

Everyone Is Building AI. India Will Profit From It.

There is a school of thought: increasingly popular, not entirely wrong: that India is uninvestable in the age of AI. The argument goes: India has no OpenAI. No Nvidia. No hyperscaler. The companies defining and capturing the AI revolution are American. The chips are Taiwanese and Dutch. The data centres are being built in Virginia and Texas. India is a bystander in the most important technological shift of our era. It is a coherent argument. It deserves a serious response: not dismissal.

The question the bear case doesn’t answer

For AI companies to justify their extraordinary valuations, someone has to pay for it. Nvidia needs customers. OpenAI needs subscribers. Microsoft needs enterprises buying Copilot seats. AWS needs companies migrating workloads. The creators of AI need consumers of AI. And the consumers who benefit most: in terms of productivity gains, cost reduction, and profit expansion: are not the builders. They are the users. India has 1.4 billion people, one of the world’s largest banking systems, a massive pharmaceutical industry, a dominant IT services sector, thousands of mid-sized manufacturers, and a rapidly growing consumer economy. Every one of these industries will adopt AI tools to cut costs, improve margins, and do more with less. That productivity gain flows directly into corporate earnings. Higher earnings drive higher stock prices. India may not build the engine. But it will drive the car: at scale, at speed, and across an economy too large to ignore.

We have done this before

India did not invent cloud computing. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google built it. Yet India built Aadhaar: a biometric identity system covering 1.4 billion people: on top of cloud infrastructure. India did not invent the smartphone. Apple and Samsung built it. Yet India built UPI on top of mobile: a real-time payments network processing over 17 billion transactions a month that developed markets are still trying to replicate. The pattern is consistent and remarkable: India is a world-class applier of technology, not an inventor of it. The innovation happens in the application, in the distribution, in the reach.

And the economic value created by that application has been enormous: for individuals, for businesses, and for the broader economy.

There is no reason the AI era should be different.

India as the use case capital of the world

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys, architect of Aadhaar, one of the most credible voices on technology at scale: has argued publicly that India’s role in AI is not to win the foundation model race but to lead the world in AI diffusion: taking the technology to a billion people, in their languages, solving their problems. He has said explicitly that India should aim to become the use case capital of the world, building on the same playbook that produced UPI and Aadhaar. That is not a consolation prize. That is the larger opportunity. The race to build smarter models is a race a handful of well-capitalised American and Chinese labs will run. The race to make AI genuinely useful to the broadest possible base of humanity: in healthcare, in agriculture, in financial services, in education: is a race India is uniquely positioned to win.

What this means for your portfolio

The bear case says: no AI story, therefore avoid India. The more complete picture says: India’s corporate earnings will expand as AI adoption drives productivity gains across a wide, diversified economy. That is not a story about one sector or one company. It is a story about the entire market slowly re-rating upward as AI becomes a tool every industry uses. None of this happens overnight. But patient investors in Indian equities today are not sitting out the AI era. They are buying into the economy that will consume it at the largest scale.

Own Indian equities for the long term. And if you want exposure to the AI creators as well: the Nvidias, the hyperscalers, the global compounders: do that too, thoughtfully and within a disciplined framework. The two are not in opposition.