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By:

Sagari Gupta

24 March 2026 at 2:16:04 pm

SpaceX’s IPO and India’s Sovereignty

The record-breaking $1.75 trillion IPO underscores a new reality that nations which do not control critical digital infrastructure risk ceding part of their sovereignty. Last week, SpaceX listed on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, raising $75 billion at a staggering valuation of $1.75 trillion. That single offering surpassed Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of $25.6 billion by a factor of three. India’s defence budget for FY 2025-26 was Rs. 6.81 lakh crore, approximately $78.57 billion, according to...

SpaceX’s IPO and India’s Sovereignty

The record-breaking $1.75 trillion IPO underscores a new reality that nations which do not control critical digital infrastructure risk ceding part of their sovereignty. Last week, SpaceX listed on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, raising $75 billion at a staggering valuation of $1.75 trillion. That single offering surpassed Saudi Aramco’s 2019 record of $25.6 billion by a factor of three. India’s defence budget for FY 2025-26 was Rs. 6.81 lakh crore, approximately $78.57 billion, according to the Union Budget. SpaceX raised the near-equivalent of that annual allocation in one day. The investors who participated were not buying into a rocket company. They were pricing control over satellite infrastructure, global internet access, launch capability, and an integrated AI platform at a level exceeding the GDP of most countries. Roughly 30 percent of the shares, worth approximately $22.5 billion, went to retail investors, three times the proportion typical of a US listing. India has no private entity in this category. What SpaceX actually controls Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet division, operated approximately 7,000 active satellites globally as of early 2026. It counts over nine million subscribers worldwide, and following a 2026 merger, SpaceX also owns xAI, the developer of the Grok AI system. A company that controls satellite connectivity, launch capacity, and a frontier AI model occupies a position no regulator has previously had to classify. It is not a telecom operator, not a defence contractor, and not a technology platform. It is all three at once, under common ownership. In June 2025, SpaceX received authorisation from India’s Department of Telecommunications, followed by a licence from IN-SPACe in July 2025. As of June 2026, Starlink’s commercial operations in India remain pending, with the company in active discussions with the Government of India on security clearances, a process slowed by concerns linked to Starlink terminal use in the Iran conflict. That delay is itself revealing. A foreign company’s service continuity in India depends on negotiations that India does not fully control. Satellite communications, launch systems, and AI-integrated data infrastructure are the functional equivalents of roads and electricity grids in a digital economy. States that built those grids in the twentieth century retained control over access, pricing, and service continuity. States that depend on foreign corporations for digital infrastructure in the twenty-first century do not. The dependence question is already live for India India’s digital public infrastructure, covering Aadhaar, UPI, and the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission, processes billions of transactions monthly. Aadhaar covers nearly the entire adult population, and UPI carries the bulk of India’s retail digital payments. The system’s design is sound: public architecture, state-controlled data governance, open standards. The next connectivity layer is the problem. TRAI data shows rural internet penetration at 44.2 percent as of March 2024, with only 3.8 percent of rural households connected through high-speed fixed infrastructure. Approximately 630 million Indians remain offline, with primary barriers being awareness, affordability, and limited local-language content, according to the Kantar ICUBE 2024 survey. That gap will not close through terrestrial fibre rollout alone. Satellite broadband, through Starlink, Eutelsat OneWeb, or Amazon’s Project Kuiper, will carry a large share of that load over the next decade. None of these are Indian entities. Their pricing decisions, service continuity choices, and data routing practices sit outside Indian jurisdiction. A farmer in Chhattisgarh receiving crop advisory data through a satellite connection does not know that a pricing decision made in California affects whether that signal arrives tomorrow. She will notice only when it stops. Foreign private capital has built connectivity infrastructure in India before. Reliance Jio brought down mobile data costs after its 2016 launch, extending internet access to hundreds of millions of Indians who had not been able to afford it before. Jio’s rollout also created large-scale domestic employment in network maintenance, retail, and customer service, jobs that remain within India’s economy. Private investment in connectivity is not a threat to sovereignty. Structural Gap The difference with SpaceX is structural. Jio operates under Indian law, pays taxes in India, employs Indian engineers, and answers to Indian regulators when disputes arise. Its towers and fibre sit on Indian soil. Starlink’s constellation orbits at 550 kilometres, outside any single national jurisdiction. Under the Telecommunications Act 2023, existing Starlink operators in India continue under the legacy Unified Licence framework, with their licences remaining valid. But no Indian regulatory instrument contains a binding service continuity obligation for satellite operators. If Starlink suspends Indian operations, no domestic legal mechanism compels continuation or requires a managed transition for the users left without service. The $1.75 trillion valuation amplifies this structural gap. India’s external debt stood at $736.3 billion at end-March 2025, according to the Reserve Bank of India. SpaceX’s market valuation now exceeds India’s total external debt by a wide margin. A corporation at that scale does not face the same regulatory friction as a domestic operator. It does not need to negotiate from a position of dependence. India’s satellite communications framework, updated through the Indian Space Policy 2023 and the Telecommunications Act 2023, governs licensing and spectrum allocation in detail. It does not contain binding service continuity or exit-transition obligations for foreign satellite operators. That gap needs closing through explicit licence conditions before Starlink and its competitors reach commercial scale in India. India’s Semiconductor Mission has made genuine progress. Pilot production started in three plants in 2025, and the government confirmed that four plants commenced commercial production in 2026. Kaynes Semicon’s OSAT unit in Sanand reached commercial production in March 2026. India also inaugurated its first 3-nanometer chip design centres in Noida and Bengaluru in 2025, a step toward design capability even as fabrication capacity remains limited. These are real milestones, not announcements. They do not yet constitute a domestic supply chain for the advanced chips needed for satellite infrastructure, AI systems, or next-generation communications hardware. India’s domestic semiconductor market was approximately $45-50 billion in 2024-25, according to industry estimates cited by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Closing the gap between consumption and domestic production is a decade-long task requiring sustained capital commitment. India’s competition framework does not treat foreign satellite infrastructure concentration as a market power question. The Competition Commission of India has a clear mandate over domestic pricing and merger activity. It has no instrument to act when a foreign entity’s control over orbital infrastructure creates de facto monopoly conditions for remote connectivity within India. That regulatory gap needs explicit legislative attention before dependence deepens further. Market Signals SpaceX’s $1.75 trillion valuation is not a data point about one company. It is a market signal about what global capital considers most valuable in 2026: not oil fields or shipping lanes, but control over the systems through which economies communicate, compute, and transact. India entered the hydrocarbon era as a net importer and spent decades building the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and domestic refining capacity to reduce that dependence. The programme continues to expand today, a reminder that infrastructure sovereignty is an ongoing commitment. The response was slow and expensive. It was also the right call. The digital infrastructure era has well and truly arrived. India is already a net importer of the connectivity and computing systems that will define the next phase of its economic growth. The SpaceX IPO makes the scale of that dependence visible in a single number. And policymakers do not have decades to respond this time. (The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

Hotline to Jerusalem

The telephonic exchange between Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu earlier this month reveals the changing architecture of India’s Middle Eastern strategy.

The telephone exchange between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu at the start of the New Year was the latest signal of a strategic alignment three decades in the making.


It came as Israel struggles to turn a fragile Gaza ceasefire into something more durable, and as India steadily increases its diplomatic footprint in the Middle East. Netanyahu briefed Modi on Israel’s plans for stabilising Gaza and pushing for a longer-term settlement. Modi, in turn, reiterated India’s commitment to peace, stability and the fight against terrorism. The message amid the diplomatic language was unmistakable: New Delhi and Jerusalem now see one another as essential partners in a volatile region.


Changing Positions

But this has not always been the case. For decades after independence India kept Israel at arm’s length. Jawaharlal Nehru and his successors saw support for the Palestinian cause as part of India’s moral leadership of the post-colonial world. Full diplomatic relations were delayed until 1992, when the Cold War ended and the Middle East peace process briefly seemed promising. Only then did pragmatism begin to overtake ideology.


Once that door opened, the relationship grew quickly. Israel emerged as one of India’s most important suppliers of advanced military equipment, including drones, missile-defence systems and electronic warfare technology. During the Kargil conflict of 1999, Israeli surveillance and precision munitions quietly helped India blunt Pakistan’s advances, forging trust that would deepen over the next two decades. Indian agriculture benefited from Israeli expertise in water management and drip irrigation. Universities and start-ups forged links in artificial intelligence, biotechnology and cyber-security. What began as a discreet defence partnership gradually became a broad economic and technological embrace.


Narendra Modi accelerated this shift after 2014. His 2017 visit to Israel, the first by an Indian prime minister, was a symbolic break from decades of diplomatic caution. He embraced Israel as a model of innovation and resilience, a small country that had turned insecurity into technological strength. Netanyahu, for his part, saw India as a rising power whose size and democratic character made it a natural long-term ally.


The deepest bond between the two, however, lies in their experience of terrorism. Both countries have endured attacks on civilians carried out by militant groups backed by hostile neighbours. Both have concluded that lofty declarations are meaningless without hard intelligence, robust security and a willingness to strike back. Cooperation in counter-terrorism, ranging from intelligence-sharing to cyber-surveillance, has become the backbone of their relationship. The pledge of ‘zero tolerance’ to terrorism is a statement of shared doctrine between the two nations who have each faced the brunt of terrorism.


Broader Shift

This convergence also reflects a broader geopolitical shift. As America’s focus drifts and the Middle East fragments into rival camps, middle powers such as India are carving out their own networks of influence. The old era of rigid blocs is giving way to transactional partnerships built on security, technology and energy. By strengthening ties with Israel while maintaining working relationships with Arab states and Iran, India is trying to position itself as a pragmatic, multi-aligned player. It buys energy from the Gulf, invests in Iranian ports and yet works closely with Israel on security and technology.


Still, India’s challenge is to translate its warm ties with Israel into real leverage over regional crises, from Gaza to the Red Sea. That will depend less on the frequency of calls than on India’s willingness to commit diplomatic capital and, when necessary, take sides.


And yet, the telephonic exchange was a reminder of how far the relationship has travelled. Three decades ago, India and Israel were little more than cautious acquaintances. Today their leaders speak easily about strategy, security and the future of a turbulent region. In a Middle East being reordered by conflict and great-power retreat, the line between New Delhi and Jerusalem is fast becoming a conduit of strategy. How often it rings may matter less than what it now represents, which is India’s arrival as a consequential player on Asia’s western frontier.


(The writer is a foreign affairs expert. Views personal.)

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