Telecom titan and Bharti Enterprises Chairman Sunil Bharti Mittal has issued a stark warning regarding the global artificial intelligence (AI) boom, comparing the current frenzy to the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s. In an exclusive conversation with NDTV Editor-in-Chief Rahul Kanwal on a special episode of Walk the Talk, Mittal cautioned that while “superintelligence [or AI] is here to stay”, a severe market correction is inevitable as capital expenditure outpaces immediate returns.
Mittal pointed out that global investments in AI infrastructure are reaching staggering levels, exceeding $730 billion this year alone and potentially crossing $1 trillion next year.
‘A Lot Of Dead Bodies’
“In this whole process, there will be a lot of dead bodies; there’s no question about it,” Mittal said in the interview.
“A lot of these players who are intermediating between providers and sellers and resellers may be in trouble. The day this froth settles… that’s the time when you’ll see the big boys emerging who will be solid players, just like the dotcom bubble where after that you saw Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Apple,” he added.
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Rather than viewing a global market cooling as a threat, Mittal highlighted it as a strategic opening for India.
The country currently faces an acute shortage of computing power and data centre capacity, with domestic investment commitments remaining modest compared to the US and Europe, but Mittal asserted, “Any AI froth settling down in the US is good for India.”
A Chance For India
He explained that a slowdown in Western markets would redirect global capital and compute demand toward the subcontinent. He said India could establish itself as a premier global compute hub, particularly as geopolitical factors restrict alternative destinations. However, Mittal insisted on strict data sovereignty, stating firmly that “India’s data and Indian customers’ attributes must remain here and must remain in Indian hands”.
“Guardrails are definitely required… We keep on hearing about rogue AI agents recreating their own sub-agents, and that’s a serious issue to be looked at,” he added.
He also noted that because regulatory frameworks struggle to match the speed of technological innovation, developers must self-regulate. “A big accident in this space could destroy trillions of dollars of valuation for the company,” he cautioned.
On satellite communication-based internet services, for which Airtel’s OneWeb is one of three players awaiting a final security clearance from the government, he specifically responded to Starlink boss Elon Musk’s impatience with regulatory processes.
“We have been waiting for nods longer than Musk,” Mittal said, adding that governments naturally take time to evaluate security risks before granting foreign entities access to critical infrastructure.
“We can have foreign assets in India, but the kill switch has to be in our hands,” he further said.
