Two conversations, a few weeks apart.

The first was with a client in Pune. He had been reading about the company that makes the machines that print the world’s most advanced computer chips. There is one company that makes them, and every AI processor on earth depends on those machines. He wanted to own a piece of it.

The second was with a family in Dubai. Second-generation Indian origin, comfortable, and watching India’s consumer economy from a distance with a mix of interest and frustration. They wanted exposure to it properly, not through a cousin’s advice and a dormant demat account.

Both had the same problem, arriving from opposite directions.

Neither had a clean, regulated, tax-coherent route to the market they wanted.

That is the problem GIFT City was built to solve. Not for one of them. For both.

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No single market contains everything

Start with something obvious that gets forgotten in the arguing.

No market on earth, however deep, contains every good business. The Indian exchanges do not list the world’s leading semiconductor foundries. But the American exchanges do not list the world’s large luxury houses either, and the European exchanges do not list the company that has become the world’s largest producer of two-wheelers, nor the digital payments infrastructure that now processes more real-time transactions than any system anywhere.

An investor in Frankfurt has the same problem as an investor in Pune. So does one in New York. Each is sitting in a market that does some things well and other things not at all.
This is not a story about what India lacks. It is a story about what geography does to your opportunity set, and about a piece of infrastructure that removes the constraint in both directions.

What GIFT City actually is

GIFT City, Gujarat International Finance Tec-City in Gandhinagar, houses India’s only International Financial Services Centre. An International Financial Services Centre, or IFSC, is a jurisdiction designed for cross-border financial activity. For regulatory and tax purposes, GIFT IFSC is treated as located outside India, even though it sits firmly within it.

It is supervised by a single unified regulator, the IFSCA, created by an act of Parliament in 2019, combining powers that domestically sit with the RBI, SEBI, IRDAI and PFRDA.

One regulator. One window. Not four.

That design is what makes it work as a junction, not merely an exit. Money can move into India through it, and money can move out of India through it, under the same rulebook, in the same currencies, with the same supervision.

I have watched a lot of Indian financial infrastructure launch loudly and deliver quietly. This has been the reverse. In mid-2023, GIFT IFSC had around 545 registered entities and roughly $41 billion in banking assets. By late 2025 it had crossed 1,000 registered units and $100 billion. Fund management entities rose from 202 in December 2025 to 217 by March 2026, with registered schemes going from 327 to 360.

The number I find most telling is smaller and more human. Investors in GIFT retail schemes nearly tripled in the January-March quarter of FY26 alone. That is not just institutions shifting domicile quietly. That is families, on both sides of the border, discovering the door exists.

Why it works

Three things matter.

It is genuinely offshore, with onshore trust. Funds are denominated in dollars, which means they are priced and reported in dollars. Money moves in and out in foreign currency. But it is Indian soil, Indian courts, an Indian regulator, Indian custodians and auditors. For a family in Dubai and a family in Pune, that same combination solves two different problems at once.

The tax treatment is deliberate policy, not a loophole. Securities listed on IFSC exchanges attract no capital gains tax on transfer. Capital gains tax is the tax usually paid when you sell an investment at a profit. No securities transaction tax, no commodities transaction tax, no stamp duty. IFSC units receive a ten-year tax holiday. Financial services within the IFSC sit outside GST. All of it is explicit, designed to make GIFT competitive with Singapore, Dubai and Mauritius.

The friction is finally gone. A non-resident can wire dollars from an overseas bank straight into a GIFT fund: no NRE account, no NRO account, no Indian demat, and repatriation back out in dollars. Repatriation simply means taking money back overseas. A resident Indian can remit up to $250,000 a year under the RBI’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme into a GIFT-domiciled fund investing globally. The Liberalised Remittance Scheme is the RBI route that lets resident Indians send money abroad within a permitted annual limit. Minimums have fallen sharply on both sides; some GIFT retail schemes now start around $5,000.

Two directions. One address.

What the world is buying in India

Let me take the inbound side first, because it usually gets the shorter paragraph and it deserves better.

The consumer. India’s private consumption reached about 61% of GDP in FY25, a two-decade high. Private consumption means spending by households. That matters structurally: an economy driven by its own households absorbs external shocks differently from one driven by exports or commodities. India’s decade-average real GDP growth has sat between 5.5% and 7.8% through a balance of payments crisis, sanctions, two global financial shocks and a pandemic. The consistency is the asset.

And the runway. India has roughly 44 cars per 1,000 people. China crossed that level around the mid-2000s and now sits near 310. Household air conditioning penetration in India is around 5%; China was there in the mid-1990s and is near 60% today. Annual room air conditioner sales in India went from about 1 million units in 2006 to over 11 million by 2023, and that is still 5%. Bain and the World Economic Forum project India’s household income profile shifting from a pyramid to a diamond by 2030, with one in two households in the upper-middle and high income brackets against one in four today.

These are not deficit numbers. They are the shape of a curve that has already begun to bend.

The infrastructure underneath it. UPI processed 21.6 billion transactions in December 2025 alone, roughly 228 billion across the year, and close to half of all real-time digital payments on earth. It did not exist in 2016. It is what turned a largely informal consumption economy into a measurable, formal, investable one.

For a global investor, GIFT City is now a cleaner route to that story: in dollars, with a single regulator, and without an Indian bank account.

What India is buying in the world

Now the other direction.

These are themes, not recommendations. I am naming companies to show where industries physically sit, not to tell you what to own.

Compute, in America. The four largest US technology companies are guiding to roughly $700 billion of capital expenditure in 2026, about 77% above 2025. Capital expenditure means money spent on long-term assets such as data centres, chips and servers. Whatever you make of the returns on that, and reasonable people are sceptical, it is the largest private infrastructure buildout in history.

The machines that make the machines, in the Netherlands and Taiwan. One Dutch company, ASML, makes every extreme ultraviolet lithography machine on earth. Extreme ultraviolet lithography is the process used to print the smallest patterns on advanced chips. Not most, all of them, with roughly 90% of the wider lithography market. Downstream, TSMC in Taiwan produces the bulk of the world’s leading-edge logic chips and is spending a record $52–56 billion in capex this year.

The electricity behind all of it. The theme most people miss. The IEA projects global data centre electricity consumption more than doubling from 415 TWh in 2024 to around 945 TWh by 2030, slightly more than Japan’s entire national consumption today. By 2030, American data centres are expected to draw more power than aluminium, steel, cement and chemicals production combined.

Desire, in Europe. Many luxury houses are European: LVMH, Hermès, Richemont, Kering, Chanel, Prada, Ferrari. LVMH alone accounts for roughly 31% of the sales of the world’s ten largest luxury companies. India is becoming an important consumer of these brands, and that is its own interesting fact.

Metabolic medicine, in Denmark and America. The GLP-1 class has gone from a diabetes treatment to one of the largest pharmaceutical opportunities in history, with analysts sizing the obesity drug market at roughly $80–100 billion by 2030. GLP-1 drugs are medicines that affect blood sugar, appetite and digestion. Worth noting honestly: what began as a duopoly is now contested by several large players, including Chinese innovators.

And the ones still forming. Defence and aerospace, with European rearmament and order books stretching a decade out. Robotics and factory automation, concentrated in Japan and Switzerland. Nuclear, including small modular reactors, pulled forward by technology companies looking for firm clean power. Firm power means electricity that can be supplied steadily, not only when weather conditions allow it.

The part I would want you to hear

Themes are seductive, and that is precisely the danger.

Every idea above is well known: the India consumption story as much as the AI story. None is a secret, and a good deal of the optimism is already in prices. Thematic investing has a long and unflattering record of investors arriving late, paying up for a narrative, and discovering that being right about the theme and right about the return are very different things. The AI infrastructure buildout carries a specific risk worth naming: four enormous companies making the same bet at the same time also share the same downside if adoption disappoints. India carries its own: the market has been rangebound for a stretch, foreign investors have been net sellers through the longest outflow phase in about two decades, and valuations in 2024 were demanding.

So I would not build a portfolio out of themes, in either direction. I would build it from an allocation matched to your horizon and your temperament, and let themes be the texture within it rather than the structure of it.

What I would not do is accept an artificially small opportunity set.

For most of my career, an Indian investor had access to one market and a non-resident had a frustrating, paperwork-heavy path into that same market. Both constraints were accidents of infrastructure rather than facts of investing. Both have now been substantially removed, and the door swings in both directions.

Sources and notes

• GIFT IFSC entity, banking asset and fund management data: IFSCA registrations and quarterly bulletins; EY–HSBC compendium on GIFT City (December 2025); IFSCA Executive Director’s published commentary (CII Artha, March 2026). July 2023 comparison figures from GIFT IFSC official statements.
• Tax framework: Income-tax Act provisions governing IFSC units and specified funds; IFSCA (Fund Management) Regulations, 2025; RBI Liberalised Remittance Scheme.
• India private consumption at 61.4% of nominal GDP in FY25: Ministry of Finance monthly economic review, June 2025. Decadal GDP growth: IMF and RBI.
• Vehicle ownership per 1,000 people: Council on Energy, Environment and Water. Air conditioner penetration and unit sales: International Energy Agency and Bureau of Energy Efficiency.
• Household income profile projections: Bain & Company and World Economic Forum, Future of Consumption in Fast-Growth Consumer Markets: India.
• UPI transaction volumes: National Payments Corporation of India, December 2025 data.
• Hyperscaler capital expenditure guidance for 2026: company earnings guidance as compiled by CNBC and Futurum Group.
• ASML lithography position and TSMC 2026 capital expenditure: company disclosures and CNBC reporting, January 2026.
• Data centre electricity projections: International Energy Agency, Energy and AI.
• Luxury sector concentration: Deloitte Global Powers of Luxury Goods; European Business Review.
• GLP-1 market sizing: Evaluate; Goldman Sachs Research; IQVIA obesity outlook 2026.

Important: Company names appear solely to illustrate where particular industries are domiciled and listed. They are not recommendations, and Opulence International Wealth Managers takes no position on their merits as investments. Several companies mentioned may be accessible via depositary receipts in other markets; the point made is only that they are not listed on an Indian exchange.

Note on tax references: the Income-tax Act, 2025 took effect on 1 April 2026 and renumbered the provisions governing IFSC units and specified funds. Section references must be confirmed against the current Act before publication.

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This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Projections cited are those of third parties and may not materialise. Tax treatment depends on applicable law and individual circumstances and may change. Investments through GIFT IFSC carry market risk, foreign currency risk and regulatory risk. Opulence International Wealth Managers is a distributor of financial products and is not a registered investment adviser. Please consult a qualified professional before making any investment decision.