India’s Uttar Pradesh state has outlined a 75-acre robotics and advanced manufacturing park in Noida, as national technology policy begins to extend beyond AI models and computing capacity towards machines operating in factories and other physical environments.
The proposed PRAGATI project — Park for Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, GPU Clusters and Advanced Technical Innovation — would combine robotics testing and certification, rapid prototyping, manufacturing facilities, AI compute, motion-capture laboratories and what the state describes as a physical AI data centre. It would also provide incubation and shared facilities for startups.
The announcement does not amount to a construction commitment. The state has not publicly identified the site, total cost, anchor tenants or funding structure. Official material refers to Noida, while an item carried by the state investment agency described the location as Greater Noida, leaving the precise location unclear.
A July 25 report said the Uttar Pradesh Electronics Corporation would lead the project as a public-private partnership, with an initial 10-acre phase potentially becoming operational 12 to 16 months after project approval. Those details have not been supported by a published project order, tender or land-allocation record, and the approval date was not specified.
Why now
India’s factory robot market is expanding, although from a much smaller base than China, Japan or South Korea. Manufacturers installed a record 9,100 industrial robots in 2024, up 7% from the previous year, placing India sixth globally by annual installations. Automotive plants accounted for 45% of the total.
The policy focus is also shifting. In February, a central government technology advisory group discussed a strategic roadmap for robotics and physical AI, including domestic production of core technologies, common standards and certification. The electronics ministry separately launched an AI-for-manufacturing white-paper process rather than a funded deployment programme.
India has meanwhile expanded the digital layer beneath AI. The government said in June that its shared national compute facility contained more than 45,000 GPUs. Robotics requires an additional physical layer — machines, components, testing, certification and data collected from interaction with real environments — that general-purpose compute programmes do not provide on their own.
Noida also gives the proposal an industrial rather than purely research setting. Uttar Pradesh officials cited the region’s electronics manufacturing base, airport and freight links in selecting it. On June 27, the central and state governments laid foundation stones for two electronics manufacturing projects involving stated investment of about ₹6,750 crore in nearby Jewar.
PRAGATI can therefore be read as an attempt to connect India’s growing demand for factory automation with the testing and manufacturing infrastructure required to build robotics products locally. Whether it becomes that cluster will depend on milestones not yet reached: a confirmed site, committed financing, procurement and named industrial tenants.
Related: IBM and Sarvam are testing sovereign AI solutions for Indian government users at IBM’s GovTech centre in Lucknow, in the same state.
