Bashing Indian IT service companies for not building frontier AI is fair. But they were built for services. The real question is much sharper: Where is Tata’s Qwen? Qwen came from Alibaba — a company smaller than the listed Tata empire. Where is Ambani’s ERNIE? ( Baidu ) Where is Mahindra’s Hunyuan? Where is Adani’s Pangu? Where is L&T’s defence AI foundation model? Where is Birla’s industrial AI model? China’s established corporate giants are building frontier models. Alibaba built Qwen. Baidu built ERNIE. Tencent built Hunyuan. Huawei built Pangu. ByteDance built Doubao. iFLYTEK built Spark. So stop gaslighting people with “India lacks capital.” India does not lack capital. India does not lack engineers. India lacks a billionaire class willing to risk serious money on frontier AI. There is money for weddings, cricket, retail, ports, media, and political access. But when it comes to building India’s Qwen, suddenly everyone becomes a cautious accountant. That is the scandal.
