Zoho's Sridhar Vembu Slams Trillion-Dollar AI 'Bubble', Says India Must Build Silicon First

Zoho Co-Founder Sridhar Vembu has cautioned against the growing hype around artificial intelligence, calling for more grounded expectations and realistic investments.

In an interview with NDTV Profit, Vembu said that while AI holds immense potential, the current frenzy, especially in the US, resembles past bubbles like dotcom and e-commerce. “I believe in the AI technology, but I do not believe in the investment bubble," he said, adding that pouring trillions into AI without foundational infrastructure could lead to a bust.

He emphasised the need for India to build its own silicon and hardware ecosystem to truly harness AI’s capabilities, noting that countries like China have already made significant strides in this direction.

Vembu said AI is built on a foundation of lot of other things. “Even if we build AI software, the GPUs AI runs on, or the silicon — all of that has to be built here. China has done that. China now has not only AI, but also the silicon that AI runs on. They have also made good chips that AI runs on, but we have only started focusing on it in last few years. Progress is happening but it will take a while.”

Vembu, while commenting on the trillions of dollars which top US companies are pumping into AI, said, "I do not fundamentally believe that all of this is going to pan-out. There is definitely an investment bubble”.

Bringing focus on Zoho products and its adoption across the nation, Vembu said Zoho Mail is globally competitive. “We are winning customers all over the world. In fact, 90% of the revenue is coming from outside India. Zoho Mail is one of our fastest growing products. We are competitive against Microsoft and Google, that’s why we are gaining customers.”

“In India, the government selected us after very stringent competition, with over 18 audits performed on every aspect, including security, privacy, data centre practices… That’s why, I am confident that we have really good tech in it," he added.

Similarly, ‘Arattai’, the messaging platform recently launched by Zoho, competes against apps like Microsoft Teams and Slack, he added.

Vembu further said that on Arattai, calls are end-to-end encrypted and the messages will be end-to-end encrypted too in the next couple of weeks.