Vikram Sodhi
Photo courtesy of Vikram Sodhi

Vikram Sodhi, Vice Chairman of Mineros SA and Managing Partner of Sun Valley Investments, has built his career operating and stewarding gold mining assets across Colombia, Nicaragua, and Canada. That operational experience now informs the institution he has launched with IIT Kharagpur: the Vikram Sodhi Centre of Excellence for AI-Enabled Geological and Mining Systems, established with a founding commitment of INR 15 crore over five years.

Vikram Sodhi controls Mineros SA — one of Latin America's leading gold producers — through Sun Valley Investments, holding over 66 per cent of the company. He is also Executive Chairman of Goldlogic Corp. and holds a controlling stake in Canagold Resources (TSX: CCM), advancing one of Western Canada's highest-grade gold projects.

The Colombia Connection

Sodhi has been based in Colombia since 2009. Mineros SA operates alluvial and underground gold mines in the Bajo Cauca region of Antioquia and underground operations in Nicaragua, with a development-stage project in Chile. Working with geological teams across these operations, he saw early what machine learning could contribute to exploration geology — particularly in areas such as drill-core imagery analysis and geochemical pattern recognition, where data-driven tools showed the potential to improve on conventional workflows.

'The question became: how do you build this capability at institutional scale, for an entire sector, not just one company?'

Why IIT Kharagpur

The choice of IIT Kharagpur was shaped by two considerations. The first was institutional: it is among the very few Indian institutions combining strengths in geology, geophysics, mining engineering, and AI under one roof. The second was personal. Sodhi's father, Col. Manjeet Sodhi, obtained his M.Tech. in Radar Systems Engineering from IIT Kharagpur in 1977. Sodhi has described the initiative as 'both professionally compelling and personally meaningful.'

Vikram Sodhi, a Yale University graduate and Sterling Fellow, serves on the Yale President's Council on International Activities and is the founder of the Sodhi Foundation. In 2024, he endowed Yale School of Medicine's first professorship dedicated to psychedelic medicine research.

Institutional Design

The Centre's five research verticals span the full mining value chain. Its Grand Challenges mandate real mine data. Its governance model preserves faculty-led academic independence while an anchor industry partnership provides proprietary data, field validation sites, and a talent pipeline. The approach has parallels with the University of Queensland's Sustainable Minerals Institute and Colorado School of Mines' Earth Resources Science and Engineering programme — though adapting these models to Indian institutional and regulatory contexts will be a non-trivial challenge.

Sodhi has said the Centre's founding reflects his conviction that India possesses both the geological endowment and the intellectual capital to become self-sufficient in mining intelligence — but that achieving this requires a purpose-built institution rather than a patchwork of vendor solutions.

'This Centre is envisioned as an enduring institution built on the strength of its research and intellectual contributions. Its purpose is to create lasting value through rigorous, application-oriented work that advances the mining sector, independent of individual associations.' — [Vikram Sodhi]