TASAM | Non-Alignment in the Age of Silicon: India, Pax Silica, and ...

Non-Alignment in the Age of Silicon: India, Pax Silica, and the Limits of Equidistance

Ali O. DIRIOZ

On 20 February 2026, on the sidelines of its own AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India signed the Pax Silica Declaration. The gesture was quietly remarkable. The country that gave the twentieth century the doctrine of non-alignment had put its name to a twenty-first-century pact whose entire purpose is to make equidistance impossible.

Pax Silica — the United States–led coalition launched in Washington in December 2025, alongside Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, Israel, the United Kingdom, Greece, Qatar and the UAE — is built on a single proposition: that in the age of artificial intelligence, a nation cannot keep one foot in Washington's technological camp and the other in Beijing's. India has now formally chosen a side of that silicon divide. And yet, in almost every other direction at once, it is behaving as though it has chosen none.

Consider the breadth of New Delhi's technological courtship in the same season. With the United States, Indian and American strategists now describe their bilateral relationship as the single most consequential of the AI age — a partnership meant to integrate India's talent and scale into the American compute ecosystem.

With Japan, the two governments signed a Letter of Intent on quantum science and technology this spring, knitting India's roughly billion-dollar National Quantum Mission to Japanese hardware and capital, even as Tokyo openly eyes India as a market for future quantum and computing exports.

With Vietnam, India has continued elevating its comprehensive strategic partnership, deepening its Indo-Pacific footprint. With Africa, New Delhi has been preparing the fourth India-Africa Forum Summit — themed around resilience and inclusive transformation — pitching its digital public infrastructure to a continent where Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and others have already signed up, against a backdrop of nearly 100 billion dollars in annual trade. (The summit, due in late May, was postponed after an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa, but the architecture of co-development it was meant to formalise is already in motion.)

And with the Gulf and the wider Middle East, India hedges in a different register altogether — even floating the prosaic abundance of cattle-derived biogas as one more way to soften its exposure to a volatile hydrocarbon neighbourhood.

Nowhere is India's bid to be a trusted node more concrete than in the physical infrastructure of AI itself. Pax Silica's stack runs explicitly through data centres and energy inputs, and here India can offer something few partners can match: sunlight in extraordinary abundance. Its installed solar capacity passed 150 gigawatts in early 2026 after a record year that added some 44 gigawatts, making it the world's third-largest renewable producer; for the first time, in mid-2025, renewables met more than half of peak demand; and analysts now expect solar to grow by more than 20 per cent a year through the mid-2030s, with the data-centre boom itself among the principal drivers. A compute node powered by cheap, clean Indian sun is a genuinely attractive proposition in an order that worries about the carbon footprint and the security of its energy inputs alike.

Yet the sun keeps banker's hours, and a data centre never sleeps. As cooling increasingly drives the daily peak past sunset, India's still-thin battery storage leaves the evening hours to fossil baseload, so the "green" compute node leans, after dark, on the coal it was meant to displace. The harder constraint is water. India supports nearly a fifth of humanity on barely a twenty-fifth of the world's freshwater; its data centres already consume an estimated 150 billion litres a year — a figure set to more than double by 2030 — and more than half of them sit in water-stressed regions, with one analysis warning that the great majority could face acute water stress within the decade. The better operators are answering with closed-loop chillers, treated wastewater and direct-to-chip liquid cooling that is pushing efficiency sharply higher, while coastal campuses turn to seawater. Whether New Delhi can make such water and energy discipline the norm — rather than leave it to the conscience of individual builders — is precisely the governance test that will decide whether "trusted node" comes to mean trusted to build sustainably, or merely cheaply.

Underwriting all of it is capital, flowing in both directions. Domestic champions like the high-frequency-trading firm Graviton are going global; Invest India has been grounding billions of dollars in fresh investment commitments through the fiscal year; and New Delhi has rolled out a roughly nineteen-billion-dollar emergency credit-guarantee scheme to cushion its exporters. This is the material base beneath the diplomacy: a state that increasingly presents itself not as a supplicant for technology but as an exporter of affordable digital systems and a magnet for the capital that builds them.

Seen together, this is not the non-alignment of Nehru. It is something more ambitious and more precarious — call it plural alignment. The old doctrine was about staying out; this one is about being indispensable to several partly rival networks simultaneously. India is wagering that its assets — the world's deepest pool of chip-design and software talent, a growing capacity to refine and process critical minerals, and a digital public infrastructure that the Global South actively wants to import — give it enough leverage to align where alignment unlocks financing and technology, while preserving its room to manoeuvre everywhere else. It is, in effect, trying to be a node inside Pax Silica and a hub for everyone outside it, including the BRICS partners, China and Russia, that Pax Silica was designed to hedge against.

The difficulty is that Pax Silica is engineered precisely to foreclose that posture. Analysts who have studied the declaration describe it as adding a logic of geopolitical loyalty to the AI economy: it treats capital as both a tool of expansion and a tool of exclusion, with preferential access to investment flowing to the aligned and the unaligned pushed toward the margins of the semiconductor and AI race. It draws an implicit line between allies and clients, and it leaves the United States as the arbiter of how far any partner's alignment may extend on its side of the divide. Equidistance, in this reading, survives only so long as it never threatens the security of critical-technology supply chains — and that judgment is Washington's to make. For a country that has spent decades cultivating strategic autonomy as a first principle, this is an uncomfortable bargain, however attractive the inducements.

India's exposure makes the bargain sharper still. China controls something on the order of two-thirds of global rare-earth mining and nearly nine-tenths of refining, and India has already felt the sting of interrupted magnet supplies in its automobile and electronics sectors. That dependence is exactly what Pax Silica promises to help unwind — but only on terms set largely in Washington, and only over a horizon of a decade or more during which residual reliance on Chinese inputs cannot simply be wished away. New Delhi is thus betting that it can accept American capital and trusted-supply-chain status without surrendering the freedom to keep trading, where it suits, with the very power the framework targets. Whether that needle can be threaded for long is the open question of Indian grand strategy.

For readers in Türkiye, none of this should feel distant. India is running, on a continental scale, the same experiment Ankara has run in its own neighbourhood: a deliberately multi-vector posture that refuses to collapse into a single bloc — NATO member and interlocutor of Moscow, Western ally and autonomous actor across the Global South. Pax Silica poses to Türkiye the same question it poses to India: in a world where power is migrating from oil and steel to chips, compute and the minerals beneath them, is equidistance still a viable strategy, or a luxury the technological frontier no longer permits? The Gulf states have answered by buying their way in with cheap energy and sovereign capital; India has answered by signing while keeping its other doors open; Europe, indispensable in practice yet peripheral in form, has been handled bilaterally and largely left outside the architecture. Each is a different wager on the same dilemma. Also, it should be remembered that Greece is in Pax Silica.

The deeper point is one I have argued before in the energy domain, and it transfers cleanly to silicon: it is essential to distinguish the short-term move from the long-term structural shift. A signature on a declaration in February is a move. The reordering of sovereignty itself around compute and its chokepoints — the redefinition of what alignment, dependence and autonomy even mean — is the structure. India has made its move with characteristic ambidexterity, and it may yet prove that a large enough, talented enough, indispensable enough state can align without being captured. But Pax Silica is a wager that the age of equidistance is ending. India is the most important test of whether the middle powers can prove that wager wrong — and every other state that has prized its room to manoeuvre, Türkiye foremost among them, has reason to watch how the experiment turns out, yet should not waste too much time and needs to act soon

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