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Inside India newsletter: Why global funds are flocking to GIFT City in Modi's home state. Aug 13, 2026 - 07:17 Hello, this is Priyanka Salve, writing to you from Singapore. Welcome to the latest edition of "Inside India" - your one-stop destination for stories and developments from the world's fastest-growing large economy. India's Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, also known as GIFT City, aspires to be what Hong Kong is to mainland China, or what Dubai International Financial Center is to the United Arab Emirates. While progress has been slow, after more than a decade of its launch, GIFT City is finally drawing interest from leading asset management firms. I spoke with experts to figure out if India's first and only global financial center is finally coming into its own. The big story. Signage in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT City) in the suburbs of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, on Wednesday, May 21, 2025. A strong domestic investor appetite for global markets, relaxed rules for foreign currency usage, and increasing tax sops are driving leading asset management companies to India's GIFT City, more than a decade after its launch. GIFT City, located in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state of Gujarat, is emerging as an important gateway for international investors looking to access India's growth opportunity, as well as resident Indians seeking international wealth solutions, experts said. Earlier this year, the government improved tax structures to put GIFT City on par with global financial centers such as Singapore, said Rajesh Gandhi, Partner at Deloitte India. While these tax benefits are driving inbound investment, the government has also loosened capital controls on outbound investments made via the City, Gandhi said, adding that his firm was seeing an increase in outbound and inbound funds being set up in India's first global financial center. Global fund houses are waking up to the pent-up demand from Indian investors for overseas markets such as the U.S., and GIFT City offers the most convenient route, according to experts. Global interest. Last week, Standard Chartered announced plans to launch its Signature CIO funds from GIFT City. Samir Subberwal, global head of wealth solutions, retail products, data and analytics at Standard Chartered, told CNBC that the company will launch the funds "in the coming weeks" and plans to expand its suite of wealth solutions over time. The British international banking group was among the first foreign banks to start operating out of GIFT City in 2020. And with the launch of Signature CIO funds, it plans to expand its wealth management business in what Subberwal describes as "one of the world's fastest-growing international financial centres." Government data shows that fund management entities in the city increased to 217 in May this year from 194 in November last year. Another major global asset manager, BlackRock, through its joint venture with Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Jio Financial Services, is looking to launch global ETFs out of GIFT City. Jio BlackRock Asset Management, the joint venture company, secured regulatory approval to launch funds out of GIFT City in May. It is preparing to start two outbound funds from the financial center before the end of September, one global equity fund and another emerging markets fund, Rishi Kohli, the firm's chief investment officer, told Moneycontrol - a news outlet part of Network18, which is owned by Ambani's Reliance Industries. Due to strong capital controls, there are limits on the funds that asset managers in India can deploy in overseas markets, experts said, pointing to the aggregate $7 billion ceiling on outbound investments, which has already been exhausted. As a result, despite Indian markets underperforming their global peers by a wide margin, equity funds in India logged positive inflows for the 65th consecutive month, according to data from India's mutual fund industry body AMFI. But funds operating from GIFT City can change that as the outbound investment limits do not apply to them, allowing these funds to tap the growing pool of Indian investors. Long road ahead. But despite these tailwinds, experts said that GIFT City has a long way to go before it can compete with global financial centers such as Singapore, Delaware in the U.S., and Dubai International Financial Center in the United Arab Emirates. From a regulatory aspect, GIFT City is on par with other global financial centers, but it needs to shed its image as an India-specific center and emerge as a destination for global capital. It also needs to match the lifestyle benefits that come with living in cities such as Dubai and Singapore. Some argue that it just needs "more time" to develop. DIFC took 20 years to become the powerhouse it is today, said Vivek Singhania, co-founder of Mumbai-based fund administration service provider Dovetail Capital. He told CNBC that regulatory structures at the GIFT City were formed around 2020, and now things are gradually coming together. Singhania said his firm is in discussions with a several U.S. and Singapore-based funds as well as Indian funds that are keen to set up operations in city. Among those bullish on GIFT City is also Vikas Satija, managing director and chief executive at Shriram Wealth. His firm scouts for funds operating out of GIFT City for their "high-net-worth clients" in India and outside. He predicts that by 2030, GIFT City will become a key global financial center and adds that the arrival of one of the largest global fund houses, BlackRock, is a "big sign." Need to know. The 72-hour crisis that threatened Meta's business in India Tensions are high between Meta Platforms and Indian regulators. A parliamentary panel threatened to remove the tech giant's safe harbor protection last week, soon after after the company was pulled up over concerns about child-abuse content. U.S. judge ends graft case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani A U.S. judge on Monday dismissed the bribery case against Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, while also rebuking a senior Department of Justice official's conduct related to the case as "concerning." Aug. 14: India WPI inflation for July. Aug. 17: India unemployment rate for July.

How AI is changing asset management careers. 38 minutes ago Traditional asset management firms are a slow-moving bunch; it's only natural in an industry with over $140tn in assets under management. But even asset management firms are catching up on the AI revolution. Slowly. KPMG's Q2 2026 AI quarterly pulse survey found that just 19% of asset management and private equity firms deployed AI agents, compared to 39% of banks. Similarly, Boston Consulting Group's (BCG's) 2026 Global Asset Management Report, published in April 2026 noted that asset managers trail banks and fintech firms in AI adoption. Asset management firms were still mostly focused on pilot programs and on "incremental productivity gains". Rather ominously, BCG said that that pace of change was "no longer sufficient". BCG's report noted that 50% to 65% of "traditional junior-heavy analyst" work could be freed-up by AI, compared to just 5% to 10% of a portfolio manager's (PM's) role. For analyst work, BCG pointed to "data gathering and first-pass modelling" as the areas where AI will make a difference. However, AI can't do a portfolio manager's role because it can't be trusted to make the final decision. "The edge will no longer come from producing analysis but from deciding what to do with it," BCG says, with PM having to "decide which models to use, how to combine them, and when to challenge them." Beyond investment decisions, BCG said AI operations agents specifically can handle execution, while the impact on technologists is well-documented - AI agents can write code, it is good but not great, and needs to be handheld a lot. The fear within the industry of AI's potential is well-felt, or at least well-recognised. A director-tier respondent to our 2026 Compensation & Lifestyle Survey, working for a US asset management firm, said that his manager employed "intimidation tactics" to "do more with less", including threatening to replace him with AI. T. Rowe Price, which had $1.9tn at the end of Q2 2026, is a good example of the conservatism of the industry. At its Q2 2026 investor call, CEO Rob Sharps noted that the firm was only just now moving beyond "isolated use cases" and seeking to implement AI more directly into its workflows. Nonetheless, Sharps said that the firm had some 130 "solutions" deployed across the firm, with over 70% associate adoption. AI is also becoming part of asset management's core offering, too. BlackRock, which runs portfolio management software Aladdin, has introduced a copilot to the program that allows its clients to better pull data and insights. As AI changes asset management jobs, developmental milestones may be missed out. Writing in March 2026, Jeremy Leung, a T. Rowe Price AI solutions manager and former UBS portfolio manager, said the early years of an analysts' career are an important learning experience. This time is spent, "reading hundreds of filings, updating endless models, listening to management teams quarter after quarter" said Leung. This is exactly what AI will do. Analysts may be less well rounded as a result Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you'd like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22 Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email [email protected]. Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate. The essential daily roundup of news and analysis read by everyone from senior bankers and traders to new recruits. Boost your career. Find thousands of job opportunities by signing up to eFinancialCareers today. Top Articles

NVIDIA AI factory compute is becoming an investable asset class. KIBU announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish independent financing platforms designed to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital to support the buildout of AI infrastructure over time. This is a major milestone for NVIDIA and the AI industry. KIBU has moved from an era in which companies bought chips and built data centers project by project to one in which AI factories can be financed as productive infrastructure - with repeatable platforms, long-term institutional capital and a diverse customer base that uses compute to create revenue. AI has reached an inflection point. It is moving from research into production. AI is creating real value, and the infrastructure behind it is becoming one of the world's most productive assets. In AI, compute is revenue. A new infrastructure asset. NVIDIA compute is not just a chip. It is a complete AI factory platform including accelerated computing, networking, systems software, AI frameworks and a global developer ecosystem. NVIDIA DSX AI factories can run the world's broadest range of AI models, modalities and algorithms - language, vision, speech, biology, physical AI and robotics. One NVIDIA AI factory can serve many customers and many workloads. That makes it flexible and fungible. It is also built on a globally adopted architecture used across every major cloud, and by systems makers and enterprises around the world. When needs change, the factory can be used by another customer, another cloud or another operator. This broad ecosystem gives NVIDIA compute a deep market of potential users and offtakers, helping protect residual value. CUDA makes the factory better over time. Every generation of NVIDIA software improves the performance, efficiency and total cost of ownership of already- installed infrastructure. The hardware does not stand still: software innovation allows an AI factory to produce more intelligence at lower cost throughout its life, extending its useful economic value. NVIDIA A100 is a powerful example. NVIDIA introduced the Ampere-based A100 in 2020, and six years later, it remains in active commercial use for AI training, fine-tuning, inference and high-performance computing. Customers continue to commit capacity for multi-year deployments, extending A100's economic life toward a decade. The market is also demonstrating the durability of NVIDIA compute economics. One-year H100 rental pricing rose from about $1.70 per GPU-hour in October 2025 to about $2.35 per GPU-hour in March 2026. Cross-provider on-demand median pricing rose from roughly $2.00 per GPU-hour in October 2025 to $2.70 in June 2026. Blackwell capacity commands a premium, with reported B200 cloud rates spanning approximately $5.30 to $7.05 per GPU-hour. That is what makes NVIDIA AI factories different. Their value is not fixed at installation: CUDA continuously improves their output; the installed base remains productive well beyond its initial depreciation period; and the same standard architecture serves a deep, growing global market of AI workloads. These are the characteristics of an investable infrastructure asset: it produces revenue, serves a broad market, improves in performance over time and can be redeployed. Bringing capital to AI factories. The demand for AI infrastructure is extraordinary. But access to capital is uneven. Many great AI companies, enterprises and AI clouds have demand for compute but do not yet have access to financing at the scale or cost required to build quickly. That is why KIBU is partnering with the world's leading long-term capital providers. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR are also among the world's leading infrastructure investors, with deep expertise in underwriting long-lived, productive assets. Together, KIBU is creating repeatable financing platforms to help the AI ecosystem build the factories it needs. The platforms are designed to help qualified AI labs, enterprises and AI clouds access AI-factory infrastructure at scale. The more than $500 billion figure represents aggregate third-party capital that these platforms are designed to mobilize over time - the capital is not NVIDIA revenue, a single fund or a commitment to a single customer. The financial institutions will independently assess each opportunity - the customer, demand, utilization, cash flow and residual value. NVIDIA provides the AI factory platform. The financial institutions provide long-term capital and financing expertise. The important questions. Is this circular financing? This initiative is designed to address that concern. KIBU is bringing independent, long-term institutional capital into the AI infrastructure market. The demand is real: it comes from frontier AI labs, AI-native startups, enterprises, cloud providers and countries building AI services. The capital providers independently underwrite each project - including the customer, demand, utilization, cash flow and residual value. NVIDIA provides the platform; the investors make independent financing decisions. This is the beginning of an open capital market for AI infrastructure. Why would NVIDIA support financing? In some cases, NVIDIA may provide a residual-value support mechanism for up to 25% of an opportunity, assessed carefully on a project-by-project basis. That support is limited, residual-value based and designed to complement - not replace - independent underwriting. This is substantially lower than other compute-financing arrangements. NVIDIA can provide support because NVIDIA compute is unique: it is fungible, universally adopted, software-upgradable and redeployable across a large ecosystem of customers. Its role is to help unlock a very large pool of independent capital while maintaining disciplined risk exposure. Can the market absorb this capacity? The question is not whether KIBU is building data centers. The question is whether KIBU is building productive AI factories. An AI factory turns energy and data into valuable intelligence. Its customers are broad: frontier AI labs, AI clouds, enterprises and nations. They are building AI because it has become useful - doing valuable work across every industry. There is discipline in the model. Each financing partner will independently evaluate demand, utilization, cash flow and residual value. Capacity will be built around real customer economics. Where is the return on investment? The return is in the usefulness of AI. Companies are using AI to write software, discover drugs, design products, serve customers, automate operations and build new services. AI factories make this possible. More compute creates better AI; better AI creates more usage; more usage creates more revenue; and more revenue drives more compute. This is the virtuous cycle of the AI industrial revolution. The infrastructure of intelligence. Every industrial revolution has been built on infrastructure: electricity, transportation, communications and computing, with every buildout enabled by external financing. AI factories are the infrastructure of the intelligence era. With these partnerships, NVIDIA and the world's leading financial institutions are creating a new way to finance the infrastructure that will power this industrial revolution. KIBU will make AI factories more accessible to the companies, industries and nations building the future. The age of AI is here. Together, KIBU will build the infrastructure to power it.