India is among the most advanced countries in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of AI maturity, moving ahead of Australia and several other markets in adopting and deploying artificial intelligence, according to an IDC report prepared in partnership with Dell Technologies.
The report on AI Sovereignty said India, along with Japan, South Korea and Singapore, has progressed beyond the evaluation stage and is now entering phases of testing, deployment and early mission-scale enablement. This marks a shift from assessing AI capabilities to structured experimentation and building operational capacity.
In contrast, countries such as Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Indonesia remain focused on evaluating sovereign AI technologies and gauging institutional readiness before wider adoption.
Despite the growing momentum, the report noted that investments continue to be measured and phased. Governments across the region are prioritising foundational capabilities — including data readiness, security safeguards and governance frameworks — before committing to large-scale AI deployment.
Due to this, Sovereign AI adoption across the region remains largely exploratory, reflecting a deliberate and risk-managed approach suited to mission-critical public sector environments. The challenge heightens with barriers like cost pressures and vendor concentration. Governments in South Korea and India have stressed the high costs associated with sovereign infrastructure and specialized compliance capabilities. To address this, India is prioritising shared national AI infrastructure to improve cost efficiency while expanding access to trusted compute resources.
Across the region, governments pursue “selective sovereignty” to maintain strong control over sensitive data, critical systems, and regulated workloads, while continuing to leverage global technology ecosystems for innovation and scale. Hybrid sovereign models that combine on-premises infrastructure and sovereign cloud environments with broader ecosystem access are emerging as the preferred deployment approach, as per the report.
Published on May 14, 2026