India, Feb. 7 -- The most recent budget offers a twenty-year tax holiday to foreign companies using data centres in India. At first glance, it sounds like a straightforward growth play. Bring global technology infrastructure into India. Create jobs. Signal ambition. Become indispensable to the world's digital future.

But this logic begins to unravel once data in the AI world is understood not as "software", but infrastructure. It is not merely a warehouse of computers, but an industrial facility designed to convert electricity and water into intelligence. Unlike traditional data centres, which mainly store and retrieve information, AI data centres continuously train and run models by performing trillions of calculations every second. Thi...