The Cloud Question

India's public cloud spend reaches $17.5 billion in 2026 and heads toward $30 billion by 2029 (IDC) — yet 63% of the global market sits with three American hyperscalers (AWS 29%, Azure 20%, Google 13%), and India's enterprises are structurally bound to them. This report measures that dependence with a composite Enterprise Dependency Index of 0.63/1.00 and, across 14 parts, 150 chapters and 52 exhibits, separates the 2–4% of workloads (T1) that genuinely require sovereignty from the ~96% that do not. It maps the $45 billion+ of announced hyperscaler FDI (AWS $12.7B, Microsoft $17.5B, Google $15B), the ₹10,372-crore IndiaAI compute mission and its 38,000+ GPUs, the ~1.6 GW of live data-centre capacity against a 6–12 GW 2030 band, and the legal seam the US CLOUD Act opens against India's DPDP regime (Rules notified 13 Nov 2025). A switching-cost model, the Techadyant Cloud Opportunity Score and a four-scenario 2030/2035 forecast trace where a credible Indian sovereign-cloud alternative can realistically be built — and where it cannot. The central finding: sovereignty is not a wholesale exit from the hyperscalers but a targeted, tiered strategy, priced against genuine risk rather than rhetoric.