At a special event held on the margins of the AI Impact Summit in the national capital, India became the 12th signatory to the Pax Silica Declaration, which, other than the US, includes Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Israel and the Netherlands.
At the event, US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor said that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will visit India in the next few months. He said the India-US trade deal is set to be inked soon. Gor also described the Quad coalition as an important grouping for cooperation among its member states.
Pax Silica was launched in December to build a secure, resilient and innovation-driven supply chain for critical minerals and AI. The Pax Silica Summit was held in Washington on December 12, where partner nations signed the declaration. India was not an original signatory.
India also signed a joint statement on the “India-US AI Opportunity Partnership” as a bilateral addendum to the declaration. It stated that India and the US recognise that “the 21st century is likely to be defined by the physical backbone for artificial intelligence — from critical minerals and energy to compute and semiconductor manufacturing” and they “share the view that the future of AI should be built on a foundation of trusted collaboration, economic security and free enterprise.”
The joint statement added that both sides “express their desire to move beyond the paralysis of fear in favour of the dynamism of AI opportunity to promote innovation and deploy it for human prosperity.” India and the US share the belief that a significant risk facing the free world is not the advancement of AI, but the failure to lead it, the statement said.
The two sides expressed their intent to pursue a global approach to AI that is “unapologetically friendly to entrepreneurship and innovation”. They identified the following shared priorities: promoting pro-innovation regulation; deepening cooperation under the Pax Silica framework to support supply chains of the future; and enabling the AI revolution to be driven by the creative power of the private sector.
The documents were signed by S Krishnan, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY); US Ambassador Sergio Gor; and US Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and the Environment, Jacob Helberg.
Union MeitY Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who was present at the signing, spoke of the strong potential for India and the US to collaborate on supply chain security and emphasised that cooperation under Pax Silica would further deepen engagement on critical technologies and supply chain resilience under the India-US Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership. India’s joining Pax Silica comes on the heels of improving bilateral relations, with the two countries working towards finalising their trade deal.
US Ambassador Gor said that India’s entry into Pax Silica is both strategic and essential, noting that India brings deep engineering and manufacturing capabilities, expanding capacity in critical mineral processing and a strong trust factor. Helberg said Pax Silica partners are building a new architecture that diffuses intelligence, placing the transformative power of AI in people’s hands and unlocking unprecedented possibilities.
India’s Ministry of External Affairs said Pax Silica seeks to build secure, resilient and innovation-driven supply chains for technologies foundational to the AI era, particularly silicon and critical minerals that underpin semiconductors, advanced computing and other high-technology systems.
Under Pax Silica, India and the US aim to promote pro-innovation regulatory approaches, strengthen the physical AI stack and advance free enterprise. The partnership envisions empowering AI developers, start-ups and ecosystem enablers; exploring joint R&D; facilitating industry partnerships and investments in next-generation data centres; enhancing cooperation on access to compute and advanced processors; and accelerating innovation in AI models and applications.
The MEA said technology cooperation remains one of the central pillars of the India-US Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership. India’s joining the Pax Silica initiative marks a significant step forward in deepening bilateral collaboration in critical and emerging technologies and reinforces the shared commitment of both countries to resilient, trusted and future-ready supply chains.
Alluding to China’s export controls on rare earth minerals and related products, but without naming it, Helberg flagged challenges arising out of “massively over-concentrated” supply chains for critical minerals and “threats of economic coercion and blackmail”. Over the past year, India, like other countries, faced constraints in importing critical minerals from China, which dominates the sector. Rare earth minerals have wide applications including in electronics, clean energy, aerospace, automotive and defence sectors.
Gor said India brings strength to Pax Silica. “Peace doesn’t come from hoping adversaries will play fair. We all know they won’t. Peace comes through strength. India understands this. India understands strong borders,” he said. “That strength, that sovereignty is exactly what Pax Silica amplifies. Because here’s the truth: strength multiplies when it’s connected.”
Helberg said that for too long “we have allowed the foundations of our economic security to drift. We find ourselves grappling with a global supply chain that is massively over-concentrated.” “We watch as our friends and allies face daily threats of economic coercion and blackmail, forced to choose between their sovereignty and their prosperity,” he said, adding that as India and the US come together on the issue, “we say no to weaponised dependency, and we say no to blackmail. And together, we say that economic security is national security.”
“But we must be precise about what that word means. There are some who use words like global governance and sovereignty in the same breath, just like Orwell used,” he said.
Gor said India’s entry into Pax Silica is not just symbolic but strategic. “It’s essential. India is a nation with deep talent, deep enough to rival challengers,” he said. “From the trade deal to Pax Silica to defence cooperation, the potential for our two nations to work together is truly limitless. And I aim to fulfil that over the next three years that I’m here,” he said, adding that the two countries concluded the interim trade agreement — a deal that shapes the economic contours of the Indo-Pacific — earlier this month. “We overcame friction points that had held us back for far too long,” he said.
“That agreement wasn’t just about trade flows or tariff schedules. It was about two great democracies saying we will build together, not just buy from one another. And now today, we take the next step,” Gor said. He described Pax Silica as a “coalition of capabilities” that replaces “coercive dependencies with a positive-sum alliance of trusted industrial bases”.
“Pax Silica is about whether free societies will control the commanding heights of the global economy,” Gor said. “It’s about whether innovation happens in Bengaluru and Silicon Valley or in surveillance states that use technology to monitor and control their people. We choose freedom. We choose partnership. We choose strength. And today, with India’s entry into Pax Silica, we choose to win,” he said.
(With PTI inputs)
