Today, the term digital sovereignty is buzzing louder and louder. Governments, businesses and consumers are demanding more control over their data, away from the influence of foreign legislation. What does it take to achieve true digital sovereignty? In this backdrop where global hyperscalers are offering various “sovereign” solutions, Digital CIO spoke to Mohammed Imran, CTO (Chief Technology Officer), E2E Networks, a MeitY Empanelled Cloud Service Provider, who discusses what makes E2E Networks a strong alternative to global hyperscalers for AI and cloud workloads.
Q.1. How is E2E Networks addressing the rising demand for affordable, India-based GPU infrastructure for AI adoption?
Mohammed Imran: India’s AI ecosystem is experiencing an unprecedented need for high-performance computing, especially GPUs, and it’s a need we cannot afford to ignore. In fact, many startups and research labs in India have found it easier to find GPU capacity in the US or Europe than within India, which is a big challenge we’re determined to solve. At E2E, we’ve built our cloud from the ground up to make advanced GPU infrastructure accessible, affordable, and India-centric. This means offering a fully self-serve platform stocked with cutting-edge NVIDIA GPUs, from A100s and H100s to even the latest H200 clusters – available on-demand with no waitlists or procurement delays.
What truly makes our GPU-as-a-Service attractive is the cost transparency and local availability. Everything runs in-country, so Indian enterprises and developers get low-latency access with full data residency. In practical terms, that means a team can train an AI model or render a complex simulation on our cloud without breaking the bank or worrying about data leaving Indian jurisdiction. By combining world-class hardware with pay-as-you-go pricing, we’re ensuring that AI innovators across India, from lean startups to academic researchers, can get the compute they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. The goal is simple- no Indian AI project should ever be stuck waiting for affordable GPU power.
Q. 2. Why is a sovereign cloud critical for India’s AI future, and how is E2E supporting that shift?
Mohammed Imran: AI is poised to become integral to India’s economy and governance, and the data that fuels AI is a strategic national asset. A sovereign cloud is critical because it ensures that India’s sensitive data and AI workloads remain under Indian legal jurisdiction and control, rather than being subject to foreign laws or external oversight. When we talk about India’s AI future, we’re talking about everything from healthcare AI and fintech algorithms to smart city platforms and defense systems. These must run on infrastructure that we, as a nation, fully control. Relying solely on foreign cloud providers means risking exposure to international compliance conflicts or even sanctions. A sovereign cloud gives us the autonomy and resilience to innovate freely, aligned with Indian laws like the new Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA). In fact, the DPDPA has underscored that merely hosting data in India isn’t enough; who controls the cloud infrastructure matters for true sovereignty.
At E2E, we calculated this need and made sovereign cloud principles a foundation of our services. We recently launched our Sovereign Cloud Platform, an AI-focused cloud solution that gives enterprises and government agencies full control over their data and infrastructure, addressing concerns around sovereignty, vendor lock-in, and compliance from the outset. All our data centers are located on Indian soil, and we’re a MeitY-empanelled provider – meaning we meet the stringent requirements set by the IT ministry for security and governance. We’ve built in compliance-friendly features (for example, we are developing a DPDP compliance toolkit to help clients with breach notifications, consent management, and data residency checks) so that using E2E Cloud makes regulatory adherence easier, not harder. Our platform supports open standards and interoperability, so institutions can migrate or scale as needed without proprietary hurdles. This shift to sovereign infrastructure is crucial for India’s AI aspirations, and we’re proud to be among the pioneers enabling it.
Q. 3. What makes E2E Networks a strong alternative to global hyperscalers for AI and cloud workloads?
Mohammed Imran: We are laser-focused on AI and high-performance computing, and that sharp focus shows in both our technology and philosophy. Our key differentiators? Transparent pricing (no hidden egress or support charges), zero vendor lock-in, and native compliance with Indian laws.
E2E doesn’t require you to build an army of cloud architects just to understand your bill. Our platforms are simple, cost-predictable, and designed to integrate into any multi-cloud or hybrid setup. And because we’re India-first, we offer latency and support that hyperscalers can’t match. It’s cloud, reimagined for builders—not just buyers.
When it comes to AI and cloud, bigger isn’t always better for every use case. We often hear from CIOs that the global hyperscalers can feel like operating a complex combine harvester when all you need is a precision tool for AI. E2E takes a more focused, nimble approach. Firstly, we specialize in high-performance computing and AI workloads. We’re not trying to be everything for everyone, and that focus translates into optimized performance and support for the tasks our customers care about. We offer the latest NVIDIA GPU architectures (including some that even the big clouds have limited availability for), and our cloud is tuned for heavy compute tasks. This specialization makes us a “strong alternative” because you get world-class AI horsepower without the bloat or learning curve of a hyperscaler’s endless product catalog.
Secondly, cost transparency and predictability are core to our philosophy. E2E has no hidden fees and a simple pricing model. For example, if you’re running an AI training job, you know exactly what the hourly rate is and you won’t be surprised by data transfer charges just because your team downloaded the model outputs. This clarity can lead to huge savings – we’ve seen clients cut costs dramatically. We also don’t charge for basic features like inbound bandwidth or high I/O, which means you can experiment freely and iterate faster.
Another big differentiator is locality and compliance. All our infrastructure is in India, which means lower latency for Indian users and no ambiguity in complying with Indian regulations and the DPDP Act. Global providers operate under foreign jurisdictions (and laws like the US CLOUD Act), which can be a grey area for Indian enterprises concerned about data sovereignty. With E2E, an Indian bank or healthcare startup knows their data stays under Indian oversight at all times – that’s peace of mind you can’t put a price on. Moreover, our support and engineering teams are based here in India, in the same time zones and context as our clients. If an issue arises, you get real-time support from folks who understand the local environment, not a callback from another continent the next day.
Finally, technical flexibility and lack of lock-in are key pillars for us. We’re committed to open standards and interoperability – our goal is to let you deploy or move workloads as you see fit. In fact, you can run your workloads on E2E Cloud and, if ever needed, transition to another environment with minimal friction; we don’t use proprietary architectures that trap your data or models. That’s vastly different from the hyperscaler playbook of locking you into their ecosystem. Summing it up, we offer world-class GPU tech, a far simpler and cost-efficient experience, and an India-first commitment to sovereignty and openness. That combination makes us a very compelling alternative to the usual giants for AI and cloud workloads.
Q. 4. How is E2E enabling Indian startups, developers, and researchers to scale AI projects faster and more efficiently?
Mohammed Imran: From day one, our mission has been to democratize access to AI infrastructure so that a great idea in Bengaluru or Bhubaneswar doesn’t falter due to a lack of compute. For startups and researchers, speed and cost-efficiency are the name of the game, and we tackle both. On the infrastructure side, we provide GPU-as-a-Service with a range of instance sizes, so a 5-person startup can access the same high-end GPUs (like NVIDIA H100/H200) that a large tech company would use, but without needing any capex or long procurement cycles. The affordability encourages experimentation, which is crucial for AI innovation.
We also realized that providing raw infrastructure isn’t enough; many startups and dev teams need a supportive ecosystem to truly accelerate. That’s where TIR, our AI/ML development platform, comes in. TIR is essentially an AI-ready platform that comes pre-loaded with the tools, libraries, and even pre-organized datasets and models relevant to common use cases. Instead of spending days configuring environments or hunting for compatible drivers, developers can jump straight into writing code using our ready-to-use Jupyter notebooks and containers.
Beyond technology, we are enabling the community through initiatives like AI Nation– a broad program to make AI skills and infrastructure accessible to young innovators across India. Under AI Nation, we’ve run educational outreach, set up “AI Labs-as-a-Service” for universities and incubators, and provided mentorship to early-stage AI founders. The idea is to nurture talent in parallel with providing infrastructure, so that the next great AI startup out of India has both the skills and the tools to succeed. We see ourselves as an enabler of the AI ecosystem. By pairing world-class infrastructure with developer-friendly platforms and community initiatives, we help Indian startups, developers, and researchers turn their ideas into deployed AI solutions faster and more efficiently than ever before.
Q. 5. What role does E2E play in supporting India’s strategic digital initiatives like Digital India and IndiaAI?
Mohammed Imran: India’s strategic digital initiatives like Digital India, IndiaAI, or various sector-specific missions all share a common thread- they require robust, scalable, and locally controlled digital infrastructure. E2E plays a pivotal role in powering several of these initiatives. Under the broader ‘Digital India’ umbrella, we’ve supported government-led projects in areas like healthcare, education, and skill development, and open data portals. In many such cases, using a foreign public cloud raised concerns either about compliance (sensitive citizen data potentially leaving the country) or about cost overruns, and that’s where we stepped in. Our cloud provided a compliant, cost-effective alternative that met the data residency requirements and tight budgets that public sector projects often have.
When it comes to the IndiaAI initiative, E2E is proud to be an active partner. We are one of the cloud providers shortlisted and empaneled by MeitY to supply GPU compute for the IndiaAI compute platform. We’ve integrated with the upcoming IndiaAI Compute Portal to offer our GPU capacity at highly subsidized rates for AI researchers, startups, and enterprises across the country. Moreover, as part of the IndiaAI mission’s focus on foundational models and multilingual AI, we’re supporting researchers building regional language LLMs and speech models.
In essence, E2E sees itself as a homegrown backbone for Digital India. We’re continuously expanding our infrastructure, such as our new data center in Chennai to improve regional coverage and latency so that digital services can reach every corner of the country efficiently. And we stay closely aligned with MeitY’s vision, whether it’s being early adopters of compliance standards like DPDP or contributing to capacity building for initiatives like IndiaAI. By ensuring that India’s digital and AI initiatives run on a sovereign, secure, and scalable cloud, we help fortify the country’s digital independence. Digital India is about empowerment and self-reliance, and our role is to provide the technology foundation for that vision, from the smallest digital service to the grandest AI mission.
Q. 6. How is E2E preparing for the next wave of AI innovation, including GenAI and large language models (LLMs)?
Mohammed Imran: The next wave of AI, driven by generative AI and ever-larger LLMs, is both exciting and demanding. I often think of it as preparing for a coming tide: we know the wave is building, and we’re making sure our surfboard is the strongest and most agile it can be. Concretely, we’re investing heavily in cutting-edge hardware and distributed computing capabilities to handle the scale of GenAI. For example, E2E was the first in India to deploy NVIDIA’s H200 Tensor Core GPUs, which are specifically designed to accelerate training and inference for large models. We’ve architected our cloud to allow multi-GPU and even multi-node workloads.
We recognize that software and ecosystem support are critical for GenAI and LLM development. E2E is a preferred NVIDIA partner and holds a NVIDIA AI Enterprise license, which gives our users access to a whole suite of optimized AI software, from training frameworks like NVIDIA’s NeMo and TensorRT for inference, to enterprise-grade AI workflow tools. We also keep a close eye on emerging trends in AI research and open-source. As new open-source LLMs or GenAI models emerge, we often package them into TIR so that our users can one-click deploy a playground. This practice dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for experimenting with GenAI. This eliminates the need of being an infra expert to try out E2E’s latest platform.
Another aspect of preparing for the GenAI era is focusing on India-specific AI needs. We believe the future of AI in India must reflect our languages and culture. There is a national effort to create foundational models in Indian languages, and here we take part by providing the compute and data platforms to develop open-source LLM projects and regional language model training. In terms of strategy, we’re aligning with the broader vision of India’s AI planners: MeitY’s IndiaAI estimates that generative AI could contribute almost $1.5 trillion to India’s GDP by 2030, and to unlock that, Indian companies and institutions need local, easy access to GenAI development platforms. E2E is positioning to be that platform provider. We’re continuously expanding our capacity and exploring emerging tech like newer AI chips or even collaborative computing models, to stay ahead of the curve.
The next wave of AI innovation will bring challenges in scale and complexity, but we’re excited and ready. Our commitment is that as AI evolves, E2E will evolve in lockstep, so Indian enterprises and innovators are never left behind in this journey.
