New Delhi just hosted what may be the most consequential AI gathering of 2026 — and arguably the largest AI summit the world has ever seen. The India AI Impact Summit, held from February 16–20 at the iconic Bharat Mandapam convention complex, shattered every expectation: more than 35,000 registered delegates, over 250,000 visitors, 500+ sessions, 300+ exhibitors from 30+ countries, representatives from 100+ nations, and 500+ startups showcasing their innovations across 10+ thematic pavilions. The response was so overwhelming that the government extended the expo by an additional day, pushing the closing date from February 20 to February 21.
This is the first global AI summit ever held in the Global South — and India used the occasion to make a bold, unmistakable claim: the future of artificial intelligence must be shaped by everyone, not just Silicon Valley.
Inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi alongside French President Emmanuel Macron and UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the summit attracted an estimated $200 billion in investment pledges across AI infrastructure, research, and deployment — making it not just a policy forum but the single largest AI investment event in history.
India's Ambition: From AI Consumer to AI Creator
The overarching theme of the summit was India's transition from being a consumer of AI to becoming a builder and exporter of AI. This wasn't mere rhetoric — it was backed by a sweeping set of government initiatives, massive corporate commitments, and a rapidly maturing domestic startup ecosystem.
India is home to the second-largest user base for ChatGPT (100M+ weekly active users, per Sam Altman) and Claude (Anthropic's second-largest market globally). It produces one of the world's largest pools of engineering talent. And its digital public infrastructure — Aadhaar (1.4 billion biometric IDs), UPI (processing 14+ billion monthly transactions), and the broader India Stack — has already demonstrated the country's unmatched capacity to deploy technology at population scale.
As Tata Sons Chairman N. Chandrasekaran said at the summit: "AI is a foundational technology that cuts across all industries. AI is nothing artificial; it is real because it learns from data and learns faster every day. AI, to my mind, is the next big infrastructure. It is the infrastructure of intelligence."
Chandrasekaran drove the point home with a powerful anecdote: at a Tata AI Sakhi event, 500 rural women with no background in computing or digital tools learnt how to use AI, build products, and create marketing materials — all in four hours. That, he argued, is the real promise of AI for India.
The IndiaAI Mission: A $1 Billion+ Government Push
At the heart of India's AI strategy is the IndiaAI Mission, a sweeping government initiative backed by over ₹10,372 crore (~$1.2 billion) to systematically build every layer of the AI stack — from compute infrastructure to datasets, from talent development to safety frameworks. Here's what it includes:
Compute Infrastructure
- 38,000+ GPUs being acquired by the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) to bolster national AI infrastructure
- GPU access provided to startups and researchers at one-third the global average cost through government subsidies
- Yotta's Shakti Cloud: Over 20,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs across campuses in Navi Mumbai and Greater Noida, providing sovereign AI compute
- L&T and NVIDIA announced a joint venture to build gigawatt-scale sovereign AI factories, starting with a 30 MW expansion in Chennai and a new 40 MW facility in Mumbai
Sovereign AI Models
- BharatGen: A sovereign AI initiative led by IIT Bombay that has developed a 17-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model using the NVIDIA NeMo framework, trained on Indian languages and cultural datasets
- 12 Indian startups selected under the IndiaAI Mission to build indigenous foundation models, including Sarvam AI, Soket AI, Gnani AI, and Gan AI
Datasets and Research
- AIKosh: India's AI Dataset Platform with over 1,000 datasets and 208 models publicly available, spanning clinical diagnostics, agricultural monitoring, and linguistic tools
- National AI Research Grid: Announced by PM Modi to strengthen compute infrastructure and enable collaboration between universities, startups, and public institutions
- IndiaAI Safety Institute: A new body under the Safe and Trusted Pillar of the IndiaAI Mission to address AI risks, bias, and safety
Talent Development
- IndiaAI FutureSkills: Supporting 500 PhD scholars, 5,000 postgraduates, and 8,000 undergraduates in AI research and training
- Startup India Fund of Funds 2.0: Union Cabinet cleared a total corpus of ₹10,000 crore to mobilize venture capital for the AI and tech startup ecosystem
- $1.1 billion state-backed VC fund specifically targeting AI and advanced manufacturing startups
Indian Industry Steps Up: Corporate India Goes All-In on AI
The summit wasn't just about government policy. India's largest corporations made commitments that signal a fundamental shift in how Indian industry views AI — not as a tool to adopt, but as an infrastructure to build.
Reliance Jio — AI for 1.4 Billion People
Mukesh Ambani declared that India will be "one of the biggest intelligence markets." His son Akash Ambani, Chairman of Jio, personally briefed PM Modi on AI-powered initiatives spanning enterprise solutions, Indian language preservation, healthcare, education, and smart home technologies at the Jio AI Pavilion. Reliance had already announced a major AI infrastructure partnership with NVIDIA ahead of the summit.
Tata Group — From Steel to Intelligence
Beyond Chandrasekaran's keynote, TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) made several concrete moves:
- Established HyperVault — a venture to deliver gigawatt-scale, secure, AI-ready infrastructure for hyperscalers and global enterprises
- Partnered with AMD to develop rack-scale AI infrastructure based on AMD's "Helios" platform
- Deploying physical AI at Tata Motors for quality inspection and real-time safety monitoring on factory floors
Infosys — Enterprise AI at Scale
Infosys announced a strategic collaboration with Anthropic to deploy advanced AI tools across regulated sectors, starting with a telecom-focused Centre of Excellence. The partnership brings together Anthropic's Claude family of models with Infosys' Topaz AI offerings to automate complex workflows and enable agentic AI in environments requiring strict governance and compliance.
L&T — Building India's AI Factories
Larsen & Toubro is building sovereign, gigawatt-scale NVIDIA AI factory infrastructure in India, reinforcing the country's position as a global AI powerhouse in alignment with the IndiaAI Mission. These facilities will power sovereign cloud workloads and hyperscale deployments.
Wipro — Robotics and AI Governance
Wipro is using NVIDIA's Isaac robotics platform to stress-test workflows in virtual environments. Wipro's Global Chief Privacy and AI Governance Officer Ivana Bartoletti noted: "India is a global talent hub for the world. Universities here produce a large number of highly skilled students, which puts India in a strong position to compete globally in the field of AI."
Adani Group — The $100 Billion Bet
The Adani conglomerate announced the summit's most staggering single commitment: $100 billion to build AI data centers powered by renewable energy across India by 2035. The investment is expected to catalyze an additional $150 billion in related areas including server manufacturing, sovereign cloud platforms, and advanced electrical infrastructure.
Bharti Airtel — Gigawatt-Scale Compute
Google announced its largest-ever investment in India: a $15 billion plan (2026–2030) to build an AI hub and data centre in Visakhapatnam, built in partnership with Bharti Airtel, providing gigawatt-scale compute and cloud infrastructure for IndiaAI initiatives.
Collectively, Indian IT giants — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and HCLTech — are embedding generative AI and agentic workflows into enterprise offerings and reskilling over one million employees to align with AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) opportunities.
Rising Indian AI Startups: Building AI That Gets India
Perhaps the most exciting story at the summit was the emergence of a vibrant Indian AI startup ecosystem — companies building foundational AI models designed specifically for India's linguistic diversity, regulatory landscape, and cultural context.
Sarvam AI — The Star of the Summit
Sarvam AI emerged as the breakout attraction of the India AI Impact Summit, drawing record-breaking crowds and reportedly outshining even the much-talked-about AI Paris Summit in total footfall at its pavilion. Founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, Sarvam has raised approximately $53.8 million from Lightspeed, Peak XV Partners, and Khosla Ventures.
Selected by India's IT Minister from 67 companies to develop India's first indigenous foundational model under the IndiaAI Mission (with access to 4,000 GPUs), Sarvam unveiled several breakthroughs at the summit:
- Sarvam Vision: A 3B-parameter vision-language model for mixed-script text, scanned forms, and handwriting across 22 Indian languages — scoring 84.3% accuracy on olmOCR-Bench, outperforming Google's Gemini 3 Pro, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and DeepSeek OCR v2
- Bulbul V3: A voice model providing 35 professional voices across 11 languages
- Sarvam Kaze: India's first Made-in-India AI-powered smart glasses
- OpenHathi: The first open-source Hindi LLM
Krutrim — India's First AI Unicorn
Led by Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, Krutrim became India's first AI unicorn with a $1 billion valuation. The startup is developing India-specific LLMs capable of working with 10+ Indian languages, has partnered with Lenovo to build a supercomputer, deployed India's first GB200 system with NVIDIA, and open-sourced Krutrim-2, a 12-billion-parameter multilingual model. In June 2025, Krutrim launched Kruti, India's first locally developed multilingual agentic AI.
Neysa — GPU Cloud for India's AI Builders
Founded by serial entrepreneur Sharad Sanghi, Mumbai-based Neysa provides GPU-accelerated cloud infrastructure for enterprises building generative AI applications. The startup raised $1.2 billion aimed at expanding India's AI computing capacity, with Blackstone acquiring a majority stake. Its platforms — Nebula (on-demand GPU infrastructure), Palvera (multi-vendor observability), and Aegis (AI/ML security) — are powering a growing number of Indian AI ventures.
Kissan AI — AI for 150 Million Farmers
Based in Surat, Kissan AI is bringing generative AI to Indian agriculture through its AgriCopilot platform and Dhenu family of agriculture-specific LLMs — the world's first. Handling 300,000 instruction sets in English, Hindi, and Hinglish with voice-based assistance, Kissan AI partnered with the United Nations Development Programme to develop a voice-based vernacular AI assistant aimed at overcoming language barriers for female farmers.
Other Notable Indian AI Startups
- Gnani AI — Voice-first AI breakthroughs for enterprise applications
- Soket AI — Building open-source foundational models for Indian languages
- Gan AI — Personalized video generation at scale
- Fractal Analytics — Pioneering reasoning models for enterprise decision-making
- Avaamo — Conversational AI platform embedded deep inside BFSI workflows, powering lending, collections, and customer operations at scale
According to Inc42 data, India had 113 AI startups funded in 2025, raising a cumulative $1.3 billion — more than triple the $430 million raised by 59 startups in 2024. Experts predict this trajectory will continue accelerating through 2026–2027, as enterprise demand moves from pilots to production and regulatory clarity replaces uncertainty.
Who Was There: A Global Tech Industry Power Summit
The guest list read like a who's who of the global technology industry. Here are the key global leaders who shaped the conversation.
Sundar Pichai — Alphabet / Google
Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered one of the summit's most significant keynotes, calling AI a "transformational moment" and arguing that countries like India have a unique opportunity to "leapfrog" in the next technology cycle.
Pichai backed his words with major announcements:
- $15 billion infrastructure investment in India, including a full-stack AI hub in Vizag with gigawatt-scale compute
- America-India Connect — a strategic subsea cable project with four new high-capacity data corridors between the U.S. and India
- A $30 million global AI research challenge
- A partnership with the Government of India to bring generative AI tools to 10,000 schools through Google DeepMind
- A new Google AI Professional Certificate to help workers master AI skills, available globally
- A partnership with Reliance Jio to create new cloud clusters and participate in a 50 MW renewable energy project in Rajasthan to power AI-focused data centres
Sam Altman — OpenAI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that India now accounts for more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users — second only to the United States. He noted that Indian students represent the largest student user base on the platform globally. Ahead of his visit, Altman said India has "all the ingredients to be a full-stack AI leader," citing its tech talent, national strategy, and optimism about the technology's potential.
Dario Amodei — Anthropic
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei delivered a keynote on February 19, describing India's role in AI as "absolutely central." He warned that AI is advancing at an exponential pace and could soon surpass human cognitive ability, painting a vivid picture of "a country of geniuses in a data centre" — AI agents that coordinate at superhuman speed.
Amodei outlined both sides of the equation:
- Opportunities: Curing diseases, radically improving human health, and lifting billions out of poverty
- Risks: Autonomous AI behavior, potential misuse by individuals and governments, and large-scale economic displacement
Anthropic made several concrete commitments at the summit:
- Opened a new office in Bengaluru, its second in Asia after Tokyo
- Appointed Irina Ghose as managing director for Anthropic India
- Signed partnership agreements with Infosys and Indian non-profits like EkStep Foundation, Central Square Foundation, and Pratham to deploy AI in education, agriculture, and healthcare
- Announced that India is now Claude's second-largest market globally, with run-rate revenue doubling since October 2025
Other Key Global Speakers
- Cristiano Amon (CEO, Qualcomm) — Announced a $150 million venture fund to back Indian AI and tech startups across stages, with a focus on automotive, IoT, robotics, and mobile applications. Qualcomm has backed over 40 Indian startups since 2007
- Brad Smith (President, Microsoft) — spoke on AI governance and responsible deployment
- Demis Hassabis (CEO, Google DeepMind) — delivered a keynote on foundational AI research
- Yann LeCun (Chief AI Scientist, Meta) — addressed open AI research and model accessibility
- Yoshua Bengio (Turing Award winner) — spoke on AI safety and inclusive research
- Julie Sweet (CEO, Accenture) — focused on enterprise AI adoption
- Emmanuel Macron (President, France) — co-addressed the summit with PM Modi, praising India's digital infrastructure
- Nandan Nilekani (Co-Founder, Infosys) — spoke alongside Prof. LeCun and Prof. Bengio
The Investment Wave: More Than $200 Billion in Pledges
The summit generated an extraordinary wave of investment commitments that signal India's emergence as the next global AI infrastructure hub.
| Investor / Entity | Commitment | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Adani Group | $100 billion | AI data centers powered by renewable energy (by 2035) |
| Big Tech Combined | $68+ billion | Data centers, cloud, AI infrastructure (next 5 years) |
| Google / Bharti Airtel | $15 billion | AI hub in Vizag, gigawatt-scale compute |
| Indian Government | $1.2 billion+ | IndiaAI Mission: GPUs, datasets, talent, safety |
| Government VC Fund | $1.1 billion | State-backed fund for AI & advanced manufacturing startups |
| Blackstone / Neysa | $1.2 billion | AI compute infrastructure |
| Qualcomm Ventures | $150 million | Indian AI & tech startups |
| Startup India FoF 2.0 | ₹10,000 crore | Venture capital mobilization for startups |
Beyond GPUs, the government expects more than $200 billion in total investment from cloud regions, semiconductors, and manufacturing.
Three Sutras, Seven Chakras: India's AI Governance Framework
The summit was organized around a distinctive Indian framework — three foundational Sutras and seven thematic Chakras — designed to move AI governance conversations from abstract principles to measurable outcomes.
The Three Sutras
- People — Human-centric AI that safeguards rights and ensures equitable benefits
- Planet — Environmentally sustainable AI development
- Progress — Inclusive economic and technological advancement through innovation
The Seven Chakras (Working Groups)
Each Chakra was co-chaired by partner countries, reflecting India's emphasis on shared ownership:
- Human Capital — Skills and literacy for an AI-driven future
- Inclusion for Social Empowerment — Linguistic, cultural, and contextual representation in AI
- Safe and Trusted AI — Transparent, accountable governance frameworks
- Resilience, Innovation and Efficiency — Energy-efficient AI suited for resource-constrained environments
- Science — Expanding inclusive AI research ecosystems, particularly in the Global South
- Democratising AI Resources — Equitable access to compute, data, and infrastructure
- AI Governance — Structured frameworks aligned with national development goals
Over 100 countries participated in these working groups, with the outcomes feeding into the AI Impact Summit Declaration — building on the trajectory set by previous summits at Bletchley Park (UK), Seoul (South Korea), and Paris (France).
Notable Absences and Challenges
The summit was not without setbacks. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang withdrew due to "unforeseen circumstances," and Bill Gates cancelled his scheduled keynote hours before he was set to speak, with the Gates Foundation citing the need to "ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit's key priorities."
Attendees also reported organizational difficulties — poor signage, limited seating, last-minute schedule changes, and traffic disruptions in New Delhi. Exhibition halls were unexpectedly closed to the public on one of the summit's key days, frustrating companies that had set up pavilions.
UN Secretary-General Guterres offered a pointed reminder during his address, warning that AI's future "cannot be left to the whims of a few billionaires."
There is also a harder truth lurking beneath the optimism. Indian legacy IT giants — TCS, Infosys, and Wipro — have collectively lost $285 billion in market capitalization as AI threatens the manhour-based business model that built their empires. The summit itself was a recognition that India must transition from merely using AI to building it — and the window to do so is narrow.
What It Means Going Forward
The India AI Impact Summit marks a fundamental shift in how the world talks about artificial intelligence. Previous summits in London, Seoul, and Paris focused heavily on safety and governance — important but often abstract concerns. India reframed the conversation around impact and inclusion: who benefits from AI, who gets left behind, and how developing nations can participate as creators rather than just consumers of AI technology.
As Dario Amodei put it, "technologies and practices pioneered in India have historically set a standard for the Global South," helping diffuse technology and humanitarian benefits through the developing world. By hosting the first global AI summit in the developing world, India positioned itself as a bridge between capital-rich technology producers in the West and data-rich developing economies across Asia and Africa.
The numbers are staggering: $200+ billion in pledges, new offices from Anthropic and other AI firms, gigawatt-scale infrastructure commitments, a $1.2 billion government mission, 38,000+ GPUs coming online, indigenous foundation models being built in Indian languages, and a governance framework that more than 100 countries helped shape.
Whether the declarations translate into delivery remains the critical question. India's domestic compute capacity is still modest compared to global leaders, and dependence on foreign semiconductor supply chains complicates assertions of technological sovereignty. But with startups like Sarvam AI outperforming global giants on Indian-language benchmarks, with rural women learning to build AI products in four hours, and with the world's largest democracy betting its future on becoming an AI superpower — the direction is unmistakable.
AI governance is no longer a conversation that happens only in the Global North. The next chapter of artificial intelligence will be written in New Delhi as much as in San Francisco.
