AI Mega Cities and Planetary Computing: What India's Clean Energy Future Looks Like

Speculative architect Liam Young has opened 'In Other Worlds', an immersive exhibition at London's Barbican Centre that imagines futures shaped by artificial intelligence, planetary-scale computing infrastructure, and climate technology. Spread across the Barbican's Curve gallery, underground car park, and a third site, the show blends film, installation, audio narrative, and set design into a confrontational portrait of what human civilisation might look like when AI runs the grid, the city, and perhaps the climate itself. For most Western audiences, this is compelling science fiction. For India — a country that has added over 20 GW of solar capacity in a single financial year, that is building the world's largest renewable energy park in Rajasthan's Thar Desert, and that has committed to 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity by 2030 under its National Electricity Plan — Young's visions arrive less as fantasy and more as an urgent architectural and policy brief. The questions his exhibition raises about who builds AI infrastructure, who benefits from planetary computing, and how clean energy grids are designed at civilisational scale are questions India must answer in the next five years, not the next fifty.

What Does an AI-Powered Energy City Actually Look Like?

Young's exhibition presents megacities not as organic human settlements but as engineered systems optimised by artificial intelligence — cities where energy demand, grid balancing, water use, and mobility are coordinated by machine intelligence rather than municipal bureaucracy. This is not purely speculative for India. NTPC Renewable Energy Limited is already piloting AI-driven grid management tools at its solar installations across Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh. Adani Green Energy, which operates over 10 GW of renewable capacity and is scaling toward its 45 GW target by 2030, has invested in digital twin technology and AI-assisted plant performance monitoring across its Gujarat and Rajasthan solar parks. The MNRE has explicitly referenced smart grid integration as a cornerstone of India's renewable scale-up, and the National Smart Grid Mission is funding AI-enabled distribution upgrades across 13 states. Young's artistic provocation — that AI infrastructure is itself a form of planetary architecture — lands with particular weight in India, where the physical footprint of renewable energy projects already reshapes entire landscapes. The Khavda Renewable Energy Park alone, being developed by Adani Green in Gujarat's Rann of Kutch, will span 538 square kilometres when complete, making it larger than Singapore.

The architectural implications of AI-managed energy systems are not cosmetic. When a solar park the size of a small country is optimised by machine learning algorithms — predicting irradiance, adjusting inverter output, scheduling battery storage dispatch — the design of that park becomes inseparable from its computational intelligence. India's planners at SECI (Solar Energy Corporation of India) and state nodal agencies in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh are already grappling with this reality. The built environment and the digital environment are converging, and Young's exhibition makes that convergence visible in ways that policy documents rarely do.

Planetary Supercomputers and India's Data Centre Energy Crisis

One of the most provocative threads in Young's Barbican exhibition is the idea of a planetary supercomputer — a distributed AI infrastructure so energy-hungry that it reshapes global power systems. This is no longer metaphor. The International Energy Agency estimated in 2024 that global data centre electricity consumption could double to over 1,000 TWh by 2026. In India, the data centre sector is projected to reach 1,318 MW of installed IT capacity by 2025, up from around 700 MW in 2021, according to JLL India research. The hyperscalers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services, and domestic players like Yotta Infrastructure and NxtGen — are racing to establish AI compute capacity in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Pune. Every AI server rack these facilities install creates a new electricity demand node that India's renewable developers must serve. ReNew Power, Greenko, and Torrent Power have each begun structuring round-the-clock renewable power purchase agreements specifically to supply clean energy to data centres, recognising that corporate sustainability commitments from global tech firms require 24/7 green power, not just daytime solar.

Young's artistic framing of supercomputers as planetary infrastructure forces a design question that India's energy sector must confront directly: if AI compute is the new industrial load, and if that load must be powered by clean energy to meet both India's 500 GW target and corporate net-zero pledges, then the location, architecture, and grid connectivity of data centres become renewable energy planning decisions. JSW Energy has already announced intentions to develop captive renewable capacity linked to industrial and digital infrastructure customers. The PM Surya Ghar scheme, which targets 10 million rooftop solar installations, hints at a distributed energy logic that could, at scale, feed into the same grid that powers AI infrastructure.

What This Means for India's Energy Transition

India's path to 500 GW of renewable energy by 2030 has always been understood as an engineering and finance challenge. Liam Young's 'In Other Worlds' reframes it as a design and civilisational challenge too. As SECI tenders grow larger — the 500 MW and 1 GW hybrid auctions of 2024 and 2025 are already standard — and as AI-driven demand from data centres, electric vehicle charging networks, and smart manufacturing clusters reshapes India's load curve, the country needs architects, urban planners, and policymakers who can think at the scale Young visualises. The MNRE's Green Energy Corridor projects, connecting renewable-rich states like Rajasthan, Gujarat, and Tamil Nadu to demand centres in the north and west, are themselves a form of planetary infrastructure — a designed system operating at continental scale.

Watch for three signals in the next 12 to 18 months: SECI's first large-scale tender explicitly bundling AI-managed storage with solar generation; a state government — likely Gujarat or Karnataka — announcing a renewable-powered AI compute zone with dedicated green power supply; and the first Indian developer to formally publish an AI infrastructure energy roadmap alongside its renewable capacity targets. When those announcements arrive, Young's speculative cities will look less like art and more like a blueprint India is already building.