NTT DATA has announced a US$1.5 billion commitment to bolster AI-ready data center infrastructure in India, with a strategic emphasis on sovereign compute and secure data residency, addressing critical infrastructure and governance gaps impeding AI project deployment across the Asia-Pacific region. Parm Sandhu, Group Vice President for Enterprise 5G Products and Services at NTT DATA, said global AI adoption remains uneven, with infrastructure and governance, rather than model capability, being the primary barriers, and noted that many AI projects stall due to treating AI as isolated use cases, inadequate data and infrastructure foundations, and operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) silos in industrial environments. He stated that approximately one in three Chief AI Officers identify building and integrating models in private or sovereign environments as their biggest adoption barrier. According to Sandhu, physical AI, which moves intelligence into machines and operations in sectors like manufacturing, logistics, energy, and mining, is set to be the next AI inflection point, with on-site AI processing collapsing decision loops from seconds to milliseconds and reducing bandwidth costs, as demonstrated in NTT DATA's work with Hyster-Yale, which cut deployment timelines from months to weeks. Private 5G and edge infrastructure play a critical role, and NTT DATA's partnership with Ericsson integrates private 5G and edge platforms with edge AI services. Sandhu predicts the physical AI market will reach an inflection point within the next two to three years, with a more than six-fold increase in organisations