India already has $45 billion in commitments from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for AI compute, but it still signed a deal with Abu Dhabi's G42 to put Cerebras supercomputers on its own soil.
That deal, signed May 15, covers 64 Cerebras systems installed, operated, and maintained by G42's Core42 unit. Cerebras provides technical support. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) works with G42, and all data stays under Indian governance rules.
Why India Needs a Second AI Path
India's $1.25 billion national AI program runs entirely on Nvidia processors. Researchers and businesses currently have access to 34,000 Nvidia GPUs, with a target of 100,000 by year end. The three U.S. hyperscalers have poured commitments: Microsoft $17.5 billion, Google $15 billion, AWS $12.7 billion. All Nvidia-based. All on foreign-owned cloud platforms.
The G42 deal flips that model. India gets machines on its own territory, under its own rules, operated by a non-U.S. partner. Cameron Kerry, former acting U.S. Secretary of Commerce and now at Brookings, calls it "India's pragmatic approach to AI sovereignty." The country adapts what's available from multiple sources rather than relying on a single supplier.
What G42 and Cerebras Bring That Nvidia Does Not
Cerebras makes the world's largest AI chip - a single dinner-plate-sized piece of silicon that replaces thousands of interconnected Nvidia processors. That architecture trades raw training throughput for speed in running AI applications. India's focus on deploying AI across healthcare, agriculture, and public services favors inference speed over training massive models from scratch.
G42 is Cerebras's largest customer. The two companies built three Condor Galaxy supercomputers in California, Texas, and Minnesota starting in 2023. That gave G42 hands-on deployment experience across different regulatory environments. Cerebras went public on Nasdaq on May 14, raising $5.55 billion in the biggest U.S. tech IPO since Uber in 2019. G42 and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence together accounted for 86% of Cerebras's 2025 revenue.
The Sovereignty Trade-Off
G42 calls this project the Intelligence Grid - a global network of AI facilities it builds, owns, and operates for governments. India is the first customer. Discussions with other unnamed governments are ongoing. Financial terms of the India deal remain undisclosed; G42 declined to say who owns the hardware after installation.
The deal may give India less control than it appears. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, allows transfers to most countries and only blacklists a short list. Whether India imposed stricter rules for this specific deal is unknown. G42 works with the same U.S. companies it bypasses abroad - Amazon operates a full cloud region in the UAE, and Microsoft committed $15.2 billion to UAE data centers through 2029 via G42's subsidiary Khazna.
As more governments demand owned machines over rented cloud, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google face a choice. Adapt or lose customers to partners like G42. Kerry puts it bluntly: "The better they respond, the better for the U.S. position in the world."
Source: India, UAE partner on AI sovereignty to bypass Google, Microsoft
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