AI Impact Summit 2026: Proximal.ai Builds AI Where Data Stays

At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, sovereignty was not framed as a slogan. It was framed as an engineering problem.

While talking to CiOL, Renu Raman, founder and CEO of Proximal Cloud, shed light on Proximal.ai laid out what it calls an enterprise and sovereign AI roadmap, anchored in partnerships with AMD, NxtGen, and E2E Networks.

The company positioned itself as a layer that brings compute and intelligence closer to where enterprise data actually lives inside hospitals, universities, government departments, and agricultural systems.

But the bigger message was this: keeping AI infrastructure inside India is not the same as owning it.

Interview Excerpts:

India’s sovereign AI narrative hinges on local compute and data control. In practical terms, what differentiates “sovereign AI infrastructure” from simply hosting global models on domestic soil?

“India’s ‘sovereign AI’ narrative has to be read as a spectrum, not a checkbox.”

He made it clear that hosting compute within India does not automatically make a stack sovereign. Real sovereignty depends on who controls the control plane, identity layers, telemetry, updates, support channels, and supply chains.

“‘Sovereign AI infrastructure’ implies stronger control across layers… It is a system-level claim, not a location claim.”

In other words, sovereignty breaks the moment upstream or downstream dependencies sit outside domestic authority. Data leakage is not just about storage. It is about who can observe logs, metadata, prompts, and interactions, and under what jurisdiction.

The message was subtle but firm: sovereignty is about operational authority, not geography.

Partnerships with global chip makers and cloud providers signal momentum. But do they strengthen India’s long-term AI independence or deepen reliance on external ecosystems?

Today, there is always some dependency in the stack. The country has to decide which layers must be independent and which dependencies are acceptable.

He acknowledged that building semiconductor fabs and chip capabilities is a decades-long effort. Instead, India’s immediate leverage lies higher up the stack, at the application layer.

Proximal.ai is building what he described as application infrastructure, an intermediate layer that can be open-sourced in parts and locally managed.

He drew an analogy from enterprise history:

“Something similar is needed in the current workload world… an application infrastructure layer where the implementation and what parts are owned, open-sourced, and managed here matter."

For defence and government use cases, reducing reliance on external systems becomes strategic. Hardware independence may take time. Application-layer sovereignty can move faster.

He also pointed to the economic scale of infrastructure. Each gigawatt of data centre power translates into massive hardware value. The underlying question: can India sustain its own large-scale hardware ecosystem? “Why not?” he asked.

The takeaway was pragmatic: sovereignty is layered. Full independence may not be immediate, but selective control is possible today.

As AI workloads move closer to where data resides, what are the real constraints on distributed, enterprise-grade computing in India: power density, latency, economics, or regulation?

“I think this is a global phenomenon. It is not specific to India.”

He compared today’s AI shift to India’s telecom leapfrog, from landlines to mobile dominance.

Only about 20% of the world’s data has been touched by AI models, he said. Roughly 80% still sits inside enterprises, unstructured, underutilised.

The constraint, therefore, is not only power or latency. It is unlocking data.

He outlined two primary drivers for private AI infrastructure:

1. Economics – Public cloud works well for variable workloads. But sustained, predictable AI usage requires cost optimisation at scale.
2. Speed – Enterprises want real-time responses. Dedicated infrastructure delivers that.

On regulation, he struck a balanced tone. Compliance protects citizens and national interest. But excessive rigidity can stall innovation.

“Compliance, innovation, and business outcomes have to work together.”

The opportunity for India, he suggested, lies in leapfrogging, much like UPI and mobile connectivity transformed financial inclusion.

With healthcare, education, and AgTech emerging as priority AI sectors, how should infrastructure readiness be evaluated?

“We have to break readiness down by the size of the business: small, medium, and large.”

Readiness is not just about model quality. It includes:

• Capacity planning
• SLA expectations
• Performance-to-cost balance
• Deployment environment maturity

He acknowledged that reference architectures exist, but enterprises need flexibility beyond cookie-cutter designs.

On data quality, he was realistic. Perfection is not achievable. But today’s compute and models can automate much of the transformation, labelling, and scrubbing that once slowed projects down.

“You get to an 80th percentile point. There will still be a human in the loop.”

On security, Proximal.ai is building what he described as a gateway function, an appliance model that ensures enterprise data does not leave operational perimeters while enabling controlled access to internal or API-driven models.

He also noted that public cloud isolation mechanisms will evolve, making this a hybrid future, not an either-or choice.

“The answer is both.”

AI Impact Beyond The Buzzwords

At the summit, Proximal.ai showcased real-world AI use cases in healthcare, education, and AgTech. But the larger story was not about verticals. It was about control.

The AI conversation in India is shifting from model performance to infrastructure authority, from cloud convenience to architectural independence.

“Sovereignty is not a checkbox.”

That line may define this phase of India’s AI journey more than any product announcement, and if the AI Impact Summit 2026 signalled anything, it is this: the next AI race will not only be about who builds the best models but also about who controls the system around them.