Dans une publication sur LinkedIn, Veemal Gungadin, CEO de Mauritius Telecom (MT), revient sur sa participation à l’India AI Impact Summit à New Delhi et lance un message d’urgence pour Maurice. Entre course mondiale aux GPU (processeurs), câbles sousmarins stratégiques et bataille pour l’accès au calcul intensif, découvrez son message.

«I just spent a week in New Delhi at the India AI Impact Summit. Here is what I saw that the headlines won’t tell you. This was the first global AI summit ever held in the Global South. The energy was unlike anything I have experienced at a tech event. Thousands of young people, not as observers but as participants. When Sundar Pichai took the stage, the reaction was what you would expect at a concert, not a policy summit.

India’s median age is 29. The demographic dividend is not a projection. It is in the room with you. But here is the insight I kept coming back to. India is not competing with the US or China on frontier AI models. India’s play is AI application at population scale, on sovereign infrastructure. UPI transformed payments for a billion people. Aadhaar created a digital identity layer most countries cannot replicate. AI is the next layer on that stack.

When NVIDIA announces 20,000 more GPUs at subsidised rates, when Google commits $15 billion in subsea cables with Bharti Airtel, when Tata Communications ships a voice AI platform in 40 languages... this is not aspiration. This is execution! Is it perfect? No. But when you combine policy commitment, private capital, demographic energy, and national will, the direction becomes difficult to reverse. Now here is where it gets personal. I lead Mauritius Telecom. Small island nation. 100% fibre coverage, 5G, five submarine cables, Tier IV data centre, AI deployed in our public schools. We punch above our weight. But sitting in that room, I felt what every small-nation leader felt: the window is real, and it is not permanent. Our Minister of ICT and I met with NVIDIA’s senior leadership. India just announced 20,000 additional GPUs on top of 38,000 deployed. Mauritius is requesting a few hundred B300 GPUs. The answer: approximately one year lead time.

That is the AI diffusion gap in one conversation. When a nation that has built the infrastructure and the governance still faces a year-long queue for compute, you understand that diffusion does not happen by default. It happens when you fight for it. And we are fighting. When Google announced America-India Connect, a new subsea cable from Visakhapatnam to South Africa running straight across the Indian Ocean, our Prime Minister raised Mauritius’ inclusion directly with Prime Minister (PM)Modi. That cable passes through our waters. Mauritius should be on it. Our PM made that case, and it is now on the bilateral agenda.

This is what it looks like when a small nation refuses to be a spectator. India can be an extraordinary partner for the Global South. But partnership requires both sides moving at pace. If we wait, the cables get laid, the compute gets allocated, the standards get set, and we inherit the outcome rather than shape it. What I take away from New Delhi is urgency. I believe we can match it. But belief is not enough. Execution is what counts. And the clock is running.’’