The 17th edition of TechSparks opened in Bengaluru with a clear message for India's tech ecosystem: prosperity cannot be imported, and the country must learn to build and own the technologies that solve its own problems.

YourStory's flagship startup-tech summit, themed 'The New Tech Order', brought together founders, investors, policymakers and technologists to examine how India can move from providing technology services to owning foundational technology.

Setting the tone in his inaugural keynote, Zoho Co-founder and Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu argued that India should prioritise infrastructure and foundational technologies over heavy spending on graphics processing units (GPUs).

"If I earn $10 billion right now, as a government, I will spend the money on Bangalore infrastructure, Chennai infrastructure, all that. There's no point spending $10 billion on GPUs right now," he said.

Vembu said the real obstacle to national prosperity is not the loss of outsourcing jobs but a lack of technology ownership. He claimed that India does 40–50% of Nvidia's chip design work and a large share of software development for Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco, but the financial returns flow to foreign IP holders.

"Ultimately, who has ownership of the technology determines what is the income level of the non-tech people in that economy," he said.

He also predicted major disruption to traditional coding, likening software to a handloom industry about to meet machine looms. By his estimate, AI already writes better code than 60–70% of software engineers and could outperform 90% within three to six months. Rather than lay off staff, he said, Zoho is redeploying engineers to deeptech hardware, including building server infrastructure in-house.

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