Speaking at CareEdge Ratings' infrastructure event on 'Vision for Viksit Bharat', Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani said the shift towards AI makes the need for such broader infrastructure assessment even more important. Adani has also called on credit rating agencies and financial institutions to adopt broader and more dynamic frameworks for evaluating infrastructure projects, arguing that conventional single-asset models may fail to capture the wider economic and strategic value of large-scale infrastructure platforms.
"AI may look like a software but ultimately AI runs on an infrastructure," he said, noting that every AI model requires electricity, data centres, cooling systems, transmission networks and land. He added that increasingly, AI would require clean and reliable energy at enormous scale.
"Therefore the competitive advantage in AI may ultimately lie not only in who writes the best code but also in who can build the infrastructure that allows intelligence to scale," Adani said.
He argued that assets such as Khavda could therefore become foundational to India's future AI economy by providing clean energy for computing infrastructure while supporting advanced manufacturing and digital capabilities.
Adani categorised infrastructure into three broad groups: replacement infrastructure, growth infrastructure and platform infrastructure. While traditional rating frameworks may work well for replacement assets, he said growth and platform infrastructure require models that capture wider ecosystem effects and multiplier value.
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"Your responsibility is to protect capital, to question assumptions, to recognise execution challenges and to ensure that risks are properly quantified," Adani said. "But there is another equally important responsibility — understanding and reading the larger transformation taking place around us."
He said India's infrastructure ambitions should not be constrained by fear, while stressing that risk must not be ignored. "The role of an institution like CareEdge is to ensure that ambition is not constrained by fear and that risk is not ignored in the path to progress," Adani said.
Adani also added India does not need lower standards but "wider lenses" to assess the infrastructure transformation underway in the country.
"We do not need lower standards but we need wider lenses," Adani said, while emphasising that his comments were not a call to compromise independence or approve unviable projects.
Adani argued that traditional infrastructure assessment frameworks were largely developed for an era when projects evolved incrementally, demand was easier to forecast and individual assets could be assessed in isolation.
"India has now entered a very different period," he said, adding that rating frameworks must evolve alongside the sophistication and scale of the infrastructure being built.
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