India and China are racing to build vast hydropower projects in the Himalayas. Framed as clean energy, the dams are also about territorial control, data sovereignty and strategic power in an AI-driven world.

In mid-2025,  India launched a US$77 billion hydropower initiative to construct more than 200 dams in its northeast, especially in Arunachal Pradesh – territory China claims as southern Tibet. With a planned capacity of 75 gigawatts (GW), it mirrors China’s 2025 Yarlung Tsangpo Lower Reaches Hydropower Project, signalling an escalating geopolitical rivalry where hydropower, territorial control and data sovereignty converge.

India aims to  transmit more than 76 GW of hydropower from the Brahmaputra basin by 2047 through a vast new network that includes 208 dams and 11 GW of pumped storage. Its centrepiece, the Upper Siang Multipurpose Project – a 280–300 metre, 11 GW dam on the Siang River – would be India’s largest. Framed as green energy, its deeper purpose is to counter China’s upstream control in Tibet and reinforce India’s water and energy security.

Meanwhile,  China’s mega-dam at the Great Bend in southeastern Tibet is projected to be the world’s largest hydropower installation at 67–80 GW – roughly triple the Three Gorges Dam – at a cost exceeding US$160 billion. Beijing presents it as part of its ‘green transition’, but New Delhi views it as strategic leverage.

Past incidents – such as China’s withholding of hydrological data before the 2000

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