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India needs to significantly ramp up its defence and technological capabilities as China’s 6th-gen fighters and DeepSeek AI expose its tech gaps
Image Source: Getty
An unmistakable sentiment at the Raisina Dialogue 2025 in New Delhi was ‘tanks, tariffs, and technology,’ reflecting a state of the current world order shaken up by armed conflict, economic uncertainty, and technological change. India must tread carefully, yet with certainty, towards serving its national interests at the intersection of all three realities.
The 2025 edition of India’s renowned air trade and display show, Aero India in Bangalore, claimed a unique achievement in this regard—getting the most advanced fighter aircraft from geopolitical adversaries Russia and the United States (US), the Su-57 Felon and the F-35 Lightning, respectively (both paradigm defining 5th Generation jets)—to participate together. Optics aside, why this matters to the wider geopolitical world, but particularly to India, is that China, besides having two 5th Generation stealth fighters partially operational (the Chengdu J-20 and the Shenyang J-35), recently unveiled two new 6th generation prototypes in-flight. This is a major concern, given India’s latest and most advanced fighter jet—the Rafale, acquired from France's Dassault Aviation in recent years—is a 4.5-generation aircraft. Supported by the Indian Air Force’s current mainstay, the 4th generation Russian Sukhoi-30MKI, and the incoming variants of the indigenous 4th generation Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) platform ‘Tejas’, India’s air deterrence and combat capabilities will fall short in countering China’s air prowess within 3–5 years.
Path-breaking developments from its next-door neighbour and main geopolitical adversary have put India’s high-technology sector competitiveness under immediate scrutiny.
Following the reports on its futuristic 6th-generation fighter programme, China sprang another global technological surprise with its Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup, DeepSeek. Albeit in the commercial realm and not in a militaristic or government-driven sense, many considered it a ‘Sputnik moment’ for AI’s rapidly advancing abilities. It offers a massive cost, efficiency, and adaptability upgrade to the world’s AI computation, otherwise dominated by the US’s Silicon Valley-based behemoths.
Path-breaking developments from its next-door neighbour and main geopolitical adversary have put India’s high-technology sector competitiveness under immediate scrutiny. Given the exponential nature of such technology cycles, India risks losing relevance in the global power structure unless it significantly ramps up its domestic capabilities across key sectors like the defence industry and digital economy.
At the beginning of Aero India 2025, the Russians offered to sell the Sukhoi Su-57 to India in a deal allowing their most advanced fighter aircraft to be jointly manufactured in India. On the back of these events, Prime Minister (PM) Narendra Modi’s February visit to meet with newly appointed President Donald Trump in the US turned crucial. It ended with the US President publicly announcing that the US is looking to partner more closely with India in areas of defence and critical and emerging technologies (CET), even willing to sell to India their most advanced fighter aircraft—the Lockheed Martin 5th-Generation F-35 Lightning II. The base variant of the state-of-the-art F-35 costs nearly US$ 80 million apiece, going up to US$ 115 million for the aircraft-carrier-compatible naval variant. Each flying hour of this single-engine aircraft is expected to cost about US$ 36,000. Russia’s Su-57 is priced at US$ 35-40 million apiece, but comparatively costs more to run its twin-engine design.
The US has offered the F-35 to 19 other nations thus far, considered its strategic allies and partners. Besides Israel, the Americans closely control the technological process of development, deployment, customisation, and maintenance. An approach not entirely dissimilar to their “AI Diffusion Framework”, which restricts the export of their top-grade Nvidia Graphic Processing Units (GPU), advanced semiconductor chips (read: hardware), central to the research and development for sophisticated artificial intelligence models (read: software). The outgoing Joe Biden administration established this ‘competitive suppression’ policy near the end of its tenure. Much to India’s disappointment, despite its growing strategic partnership with the US, it is clubbed outside the list of the US’s 18 ‘trusted’ Tier 1 nations within the framework, making India’s path to frontier AI advances slower and more obstacle-ridden.
The F-35 offer is being perceived to have twice the value to the US. Getting India to commit to this expensive defence programme and balance some trade gaps between the two nations will also make India reconsider its long-standing, well-entrenched defence procurement relationship with the US’s long-standing military rival Russia.
Trump’s businessman-like approach to getting the US a ‘better deal’ in its trade relations with the wider world (including once-close allies like the European Union and Canada) has alerted the global economy. While he has been talking, and in some cases imposing, a reciprocal tariff policy with many countries. In the case of India, the F-35 offer is being perceived to have twice the value to the US. Getting India to commit to this expensive defence programme and balance some trade gaps between the two nations will also make India reconsider its long-standing, well-entrenched defence procurement relationship with the US’s long-standing military rival Russia.
Pakistan, too, is reportedly keen on upgrading its air force capabilities by acquiring the J-35 from China by 2026, and by participating in Türkiye’s operational 5th-Gen combat fighter programme ‘KAAN’. To counter these advances by India’s two foremost security threats, its indigenous Advanced Multi-role Combat Aircraft (AMCA) project is in motion and showcased a 5.5 Generation prototype at this year’s Aero India. However, this highly anticipated project is almost 10 years from completion and deployment, essentially leaving the Indian Air Force without a comprehensive 5th-generation stealth platform until 2035. By then, most major air forces globally would have moved to a 6th Generation platform. The US has just announced its own Air Force’s 6th Generation stealth fighter initiative, the F-47, with Boeing.
India is both a developing country and a rising power, balancing abject poverty with global agendas. Being one of the top arms importers in the world, alongside its expanding oil and energy needs, puts a significant burden on the Indian economy. A strategically critical need towards future-proofing its national security and air force, the 5th generation stealth fighter acquisition is, therefore, a topic of intense national debate. Since the 1999 Kargil War, India’s terrain and geostrategic reality with its northern neighbours have pushed it towards developing unconventional means and methods of warfare. As evident in the Ukraine-Russia war in progress since 2022, modern warfare has adapted to advances in technologies such as drone and missile systems. The question remains whether it makes sense for India to commit to such an expensive conventional warfare platform (like the F-35), in light of the constraints highlighted above.
Similarly, in response to the DeepSeek milestone, India must show long-term vision to keep up with the rapid advances in AI and maintain its ‘strategic autonomy’. Its key focus should include computational capacity via high-end infrastructure and algorithmic ability via foundational models. India has significant ground to cover in the next 2-3 years on these resource-heavy, expensive endeavours. As with the foreign-acquisition-led Multi-Role Fighter Aircraft (MRFA) programme and indigenous projects such as the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) and Advanced Multirole Combat Aircraft (AMCA), catering to India’s short, near, and long-term air combat needs respectively, the Indian Government has gone into a mission-mode to keep up with the global AI race. Its flagship INR 10,370 crore ‘India AI Mission’ is working towards developing an indigenous large-language model (LLM) by the end of 2025. To power that goal, 10 companies have been selected to supply a common compute empanelment of 18,693 high-end GPU chips, including 12,896 of the world’s foremost Nvidia H100 variety. Nvidia currently dominates over 80 percent of the global GPU market.
Geopolitical tensions in the Taiwan Strait have led India’s nascent semiconductor industry to fast-track its plans for self-reliance in manufacturing.
Taiwan is currently the world’s largest chipmaker, holding approximately 44 percent of the global market share, followed by China (28 percent), South Korea (12 percent), the US (6 percent) and Japan (2 percent), data from Taiwanese consultancy Trendforce showed. Geopolitical tensions in the Taiwan Strait have led India’s nascent semiconductor industry to fast-track its plans for self-reliance in manufacturing. Through its ‘India Semiconductor Mission’, albeit by leveraging investment and expertise from countries like Taiwan and the US, and companies like PSMC, Micron and Nvidia, India is pursuing a US$ 500 billion electronics market by 2030. As the world’s 5th largest economy, offering competitive labour costs for chip manufacturing and contributing 20 percent of the world’s chip design, India could be on its way to becoming a chip powerhouse in a decade.
Despite the Indian government pushing policies like ‘Make in India’ and the Production Linked Incentives (PLI), the share of manufacturing in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has barely crossed 15 percent over the last two decades. The share of manufacturing employment has remained stagnant at around 12 percent. Both examples discussed above—next-gen stealth fighter aircraft and cutting-edge AI computation—suggest India's path to high-technology-led geostrategic autonomy and hard power lies upon its soft power. Leveraging its people domestically, powering its research and development, design and manufacturing, and its partnerships globally by powering its speed, efficiency, and scale. The 2025 Semi Connect Conference in Gujarat is an example of strong intent in that direction, with billion-dollar investments, game-changing MOUs, and strategic alliances set up towards supercharging domestic semiconductor production, innovation, talent, and employment.
For India’s risk-averse, bureaucracy-driven high-tech sector, these are not blue-sky explorations anymore, but target-locked goals of critical national interest.
Rahul Batra is a geopolitical analyst with extensive experience at the intersection of digital platforms and international affairs.
The views expressed above belong to the author(s). ORF research and analyses now available on Telegram! Click here to access our curated content — blogs, longforms and interviews.
Rahul Batra is an independent consultant with extensive experience at the intersection of digital platforms and international affairs. He spent many years across Google’s global ...
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