Data Is the New Oil. India Is Building the Refineries. 

In articulating the vision that “data is the new oil and data centres are the new refineries,” Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has outlined India’s comprehensive strategy for technological self-reliance, which involves building an entire digital value chain to ensure that the economic value generated from Indian data benefits the nation’s economy and security. This ambitious plan is founded on the robust pipeline of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), which facilitates the flow of data for services like digital credit, and is being realized through a boom in domestic data centre construction that acts as the “refinery” for data processing and storage.

To complete this ecosystem, India is simultaneously fostering indigenous AI development for contextual intelligence and preparing for a 6G future, creating an integrated digital stack designed to achieve sovereignty, fuel grassroots economic growth, and position the country as a pioneer in the global digital economy.

Data Is the New Oil. India Is Building the Refineries. 

If data is the new oil, then a nation without the capacity to process and refine it is like a country sitting on a vast untapped reservoir, forced to export its crude potential and import expensive finished goods. This powerful analogy, recently articulated by India’s Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, cuts to the heart of the country’s ambitious digital destiny. 

Speaking in New Delhi, Minister Vaishnaw didn’t just reiterate a popular tech cliché; he laid out a comprehensive blueprint for how India is actively constructing the “refineries”—the data centres and the indigenous technologies—to harness this resource and achieve true technological self-reliance, or Aatmanirbharta. 

But what does this vision mean on the ground? It’s a multi-pronged strategy weaving together infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and next-generation connectivity into a formidable digital fabric. 

Beyond the Slogan: Why “Data as Oil” is a Perfect Analogy for India 

The comparison of data to oil works because it captures both the immense value and the necessary processing chain. 

• Crude Data is Raw Potential: Just like unrefined oil, raw data—our search queries, digital payments, health records, travel patterns—is messy and of limited immediate use. Its true value is latent. 

• Refining is Processing: Data centres are the modern refineries. They are the massive, power-intensive facilities that house the servers which clean, process, store, and analyze this raw data, turning it into actionable intelligence, functional services, and economic value. 

• The End Product is Power: Refined oil becomes fuel, plastic, and chemicals that power industries. Refined data becomes personalized healthcare predictions, optimized supply chains, targeted financial services, and intelligent governance systems that power a modern economy. 

For India, a nation generating one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing data streams, the imperative is clear. Building domestic “refining” capacity is no longer an IT strategy; it’s a core tenet of national security and economic sovereignty. It ensures that the economic value generated from Indian data accrues within India, creating jobs, fostering innovation, and preventing a digital dependency on foreign tech giants. 

The Foundation: Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) as the National Pipeline 

Before you can refine, you need a pipeline to transport the crude. In India’s digital landscape, this pipeline is the groundbreaking **Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI)**—the trio of Aadhaar (digital identity), UPI (digital payments), and the Account Aggregator framework (consent-based data sharing). 

Minister Vaishnaw’s emphasis on “digital credit” highlights this perfectly. The DPI has democratized finance. A small merchant in a tier-2 city can now access a loan based on their digital transaction history via UPI, a process that was unthinkably cumbersome a decade ago. This isn’t just convenience; it’s a systemic injection of capital into the grassroots of the economy. 

The DPI has effectively laid the pipes through which the nation’s economic “data oil” flows, setting the stage for the refineries to add immense value. 

The Refineries Boom: Data Centres and the Geopolitics of Storage 

The announcement signals a massive, ongoing shift in India’s infrastructure priorities. The data centre industry in India is experiencing an unprecedented boom, driven by the Data Protection Act, the push for data localization, and an explosion in cloud computing and streaming services. 

These facilities are no longer just warehouses for servers. They are strategic assets. By incentivizing and building these centres domestically, India aims to: 

1. Enhance Security and Privacy: Keeping Indian citizens’ data within national borders is a key step towards complying with privacy norms and protecting it from foreign surveillance. 

1. Reduce Latency: For emerging technologies like autonomous vehicles, telemedicine, and advanced AI, every millisecond counts. Local data centres ensure faster response times for a billion users. 

1. Attract Global Investment: The government’s clear stance makes India an attractive destination for global companies like Google, which need compliant, scalable infrastructure to serve the Indian market. 

Igniting the AI Engine: The Indigenous Spark 

A refinery doesn’t just store oil; it catalyzes it into higher-value products. Similarly, data centres are useless without the intelligence to process the information within them. This is where Vaishnaw’s announcements on Artificial Intelligence become critical. 

The news that Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam is set to launch its indigenous AI model by year-end is a landmark development. Why does a homegrown AI model matter? 

• Linguistic and Cultural Context: Global AI models like GPT-4 are trained primarily on Western data. An AI built in India, for India, will inherently understand the nuances, languages, and cultural contexts of the subcontinent. It will be better at processing Hindi, Tamil, or Bengali and understanding local queries. 

• Sovereignty and Control: Relying on foreign AI models poses a strategic risk. An indigenous model ensures that the core intelligence governing future Indian industries remains in Indian hands. 

• Economic Tailoring: It can be optimized for specific Indian use cases—such as helping farmers with crop disease diagnosis in their local language or simplifying complex government schemes for citizens. 

Complementing this, Google’s proposed $15 billion AI hub in Visakhapatnam is not a rival project but a symbiotic one. It represents a vital fusion of global expertise and local ambition. This hub will cultivate a rich talent pool, drive foundational research, and create a vibrant ecosystem that indigenous startups like Sarvam can feed off. It’s a classic case of “and,” not “or.” 

The 6G Future: The High-Speed Distribution Network 

No vision of a digital future is complete without discussing connectivity. Minister Vaishnaw’s prediction that 6G will completely replace current 4G and 5G networks is a bold statement of intent. 

While 5G is still rolling out, India is already placing its bets on the next leap. 6G is envisioned not just as a faster internet, but as a seamlessly integrated network where the physical and digital worlds truly converge. For the “data refinery” model: 

• 4G was about connecting people. 

• 5G is about connecting people and a massive number of devices (IoT). 

• 6G aims to create a unified computational fabric, where the network itself is a distributed computer. This will be essential for the real-time AI processing required by the data-centric economy of the future. 

By investing in 6G research now, India aims to avoid the catch-up game it played with previous generations of telecom technology and instead position itself as a pioneer. 

The Road Ahead: Challenges and Opportunities 

The path to Aatmanirbharta in the digital age is fraught with challenges. The energy demands of data centres are colossal, necessitating a parallel green energy push. The AI race requires sustained investment in foundational research and top-tier talent retention. And rolling out 6G will require immense capital expenditure and global standard-setting collaboration. 

Yet, the opportunities are transformative. By consciously building an integrated stack—from the digital identity pipes (DPI) and the physical refineries (data centres) to the intelligent software (AI) and the high-speed networks (6G)—India is architecting its own unique path to technological leadership. 

Minister Vaishnaw’s speech was more than a summary of projects; it was a declaration of a new industrial policy for the 21st century. In this new economy, the most valuable currency is data, and India is no longer content to just produce it. It is building the entire value chain to refine, utilize, and ultimately, be powered by it. The world’s largest democracy isn’t just entering the digital race; it’s attempting to define the track itself.