Clouds, Colonies and Code

The Cloud has landlords. Do you know who they are? This talk begins where most AI conversations never go, at the infrastructure layer that made the revolution possible: cloud computing. It asks who benefits from the AI revolution, who pays for it, and what India is doing to fight back. Every AI query made has a physical address, political allegiance, and a human price tag, all of which are carefully kept invisible. The Cloud is a network of physical data centres owned overwhelmingly by a few large corporations, running on water, electricity, and human labour. It is the infrastructure on which India’s payment, healthcare, governance, and AI ambitions, now depend. Cloud computing’s first great revolution gave the world social media, which could only exist because vast, always-on data centres made it possible to connect billions of people simultaneously. Social media produced something else too: an ocean of human data, of our thoughts, relationships, and behaviours, harvested at a scale never before possible. AI is the second great revolution, feeding on this data alongside books, medical records, and every other digital trace we have left on the internet. From the RBI banning Mastercard for eleven months to OpenAI’s content moderators in Kenya earning less than two dollars an hour, this is a story of technology as power. Can the rules be rewritten before the empire becomes permanent?