India AI Impact Summit 2026: Nation Charts Roadmap from Vision to Global AI Leadership

The India AI Impact Summit 2026, held at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi from February 16 to 20, 2026, marked one of the most significant milestones in global artificial intelligence governance. As the fourth in a prestigious series of global AI summits following Bletchley Park (2023), Seoul (2024), and Paris (2025) it became the first-ever such summit hosted in the Global South, signalling a historic shift in the locus of AI leadership.

Organised under the aegis of India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and anchored by the IndiaAI Mission, the five-day event drew more than 250,000 visitors, 20+ heads of state, over 50 international ministers, 40+ global CEOs, and participants from over 100 countries. The summit's central theme "From Vision to Action" reflected a deliberate shift from dialogue about AI to demonstrable, measurable impact.

The summit was structured around three foundational principles: People (AI must serve humanity in all its diversity), Planet (AI innovation must align with environmental stewardship), and Progress (AI benefits must be equitably shared). Seven thematic 'Chakras' or working groups covering human capital, inclusion, trust, resilience, science, resources, and social good organised the summit's deliberations and deliverables.

The India AI Impact Summit 2026 was, by any measure, the most star-studded AI event of the decade. The six-day programme was designed to escalate in intensity: the first three days were dominated by an AI Expo featuring 300+ exhibitors from India and 30+ countries across more than ten thematic pavilions, followed by high-level plenary sessions with heads of state and global industry leaders in the final three days.

The AI Expo alone drew massive crowds, with organisers extending the event by an additional day due to overwhelming turnout. Students, developers, researchers, and entrepreneurs queued for hours to witness live demonstrations of cutting-edge AI models and hardware innovations. Against this vibrant backdrop, the summit advanced three core ambitions for India: establishing itself as a global AI hub, asserting technological sovereignty, and contributing meaningfully to global AI governance norms. Personally for me Hall6, was the highlight, where all startups were housed to showcase their innovation. 

The New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments

The most consequential policy outcome of the summit was the unveiling of the 'New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments' a voluntary framework adopted by leading global and Indian AI firms. Announced by Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, the initiative brought together global frontier AI companies alongside Indian innovators including Sarvam AI, BharatGen, Yani, and Soket AI.

The commitments reflect a shared vision for inclusive, responsible, and beneficial AI development. Participating companies pledged to advance understanding of real-world AI usage to support policies on issues including jobs, multilingual accessibility, and contextual evaluations. The framework positions India as a convenor of global AI norms rather than merely a consumer of them.

Prime Minister Modi's MANAV Vision

Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the summit and, on Day 4, unveiled India's 'MANAV' vision a human-centric AI framework built around five principles: Ethics, Accountability, Sovereignty, Accessibility, and Legitimacy. The prime minister called for the democratisation of artificial intelligence, emphasising that AI must remain aligned with human values and that its capabilities must be developed for and accessible to all people.

Modi also announced a major policy shift in the Union Budget aimed at attracting global data to reside in and be processed in India, positioning the country as a high-value data services hub for the world. He declared that India's choices in AI over the coming years would shape not just its own future, but the global AI order.

Record Investment Commitments: Over $200 Billion

The summit attracted over $200 billion in combined AI investment commitments, making it the largest single gathering of AI investment pledges in history. The major announcements included:

Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani announced a plan to invest ₹10 trillion (approximately $110 billion) over seven years to expand AI infrastructure and services across India, pledging to reduce the cost of intelligence and build scalable, integrated technology platforms.

Adani Group pledged $100 billion to build AI data centres powered by renewable energy by 2035, with an additional $150 billion expected to flow into server manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure, and sovereign cloud platforms.

Google announced a $15 billion investment in foundational AI infrastructure in India, including a full-stack AI hub in Visakhapatnam and the America-India Connect initiative to deliver new fibre-optic routes between the US, India, and multiple locations across the Southern Hemisphere.

Microsoft committed ₹1.5 lakh crore (approximately $18 billion) for data centres and AI training across India.
Amazon earmarked ₹2.9 lakh crore for cloud infrastructure and AI-driven digitisation projects by 2030.
OpenAI and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced a collaboration to build 100 MW of dedicated AI compute infrastructure in India.

Blackstone invested $600 million in Indian cloud startup Neysa.

The Indian government earmarked $1.1 billion for a new AI venture capital fund.
The government also announced the addition of 20,000 GPUs to the IndiaAI Mission's existing fleet of 38,000 GPUs, along with the creation of a National AI Research Grid to strengthen computing infrastructure and collaboration between universities, startups, and public institutions.

India's Sovereign AI Emerges

Perhaps the most electrifying dimension of the summit was the unveiling of India's own sovereign AI models a decisive signal that India intends to be a creator of AI, not merely a consumer of foreign-built systems.

Sarvam AI: India's Breakout AI Star

Bengaluru-based Sarvam AI, founded in 2023 by Dr Vivek Raghavan and Dr Pratyush Kumar, emerged as the undisputed star of the summit. Its pavilion reportedly drew record crowds, and a defining moment came when Prime Minister Modi was photographed wearing the company's AI-powered smart glasses the Sarvam Kaze demonstrating India's ambitions not just in AI software but in hardware innovation.

Sarvam AI unveiled two landmark large language models trained entirely in India:

Sarvam-30B: A 30-billion-parameter model pre-trained on 16 trillion tokens, optimised for long conversations and agentic AI workflows, supporting all 22 scheduled Indian languages.
Sarvam-105B: A 105-billion-parameter model trained from scratch using domestic compute infrastructure under the IndiaAI Mission, using a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to reduce inference costs. The model supports a 128,000-token context window and outperforms DeepSeek R1 and Google Gemini Flash on several benchmarks. It also reportedly outperforms GPT-120B on MMLU-Pro evaluations.Sarvam Kaze: AI-powered smart glasses capable of real-time visual and auditory processing, designed and manufactured in India, set for public availability in May 2026.
Sarvam Vikram: A multilingual chatbot honouring physicist Vikram Sarabhai, demonstrating voice-first interactions across multiple Indian languages.
Edge AI partnerships with Qualcomm and HMD (Nokia phones) to bring conversational AI to feature phones in local languages, and a collaboration with Bosch to embed AI assistants in automobiles.

Gnani.ai: Vachana TTS-The Voice of India

Bengaluru-based conversational AI firm Gnani.ai launched Vachana TTS (Text-to-Speech), a voice AI model that can clone voices in 12 Indian languages using less than 10 seconds of reference audio. The system preserves tone, pitch, and speaking style while allowing the same voice to speak fluently across multiple Indian languages without losing identity. Gnani.ai also introduced Vachana STT (Speech-to-Text), an enterprise-grade Indic speech model trained on over one million hours of real-world voice data under the IndiaAI Mission. Both systems are built for low-bandwidth conditions, targeting government services, customer support, and enterprise deployments.

BharatGen: Param2 17B- Built by Bharat, for Bharat

BharatGen, an IIT Bombay-led consortium, unveiled Param2 17B MoE a 17-billion-parameter multilingual foundational model developed in collaboration with NVIDIA. Describing itself as India's first sovereign AI initiative, BharatGen designed the model to capture India's linguistic and cultural diversity, with applications spanning governance, defence, agriculture, healthcare, and commercial sectors. The model is optimised for Indic languages and is positioned for deployment across public sector systems.

Other Notable Technology Showcases

Cohere Labs launched a family of multilingual AI models supporting over 70 languages, addressing the needs of diverse global markets.
Cartesia (Voice AI) partnered with India's Blue Machines for enterprise voice solutions with local data residency.
STELLAR Tool: The Central Electricity Authority's indigenously developed AI-powered resource adequacy model, launched in April 2025, was showcased for its role in energy planning and AI-enabled grid management.
The AI Expo featured 300+ exhibitors from over 30 countries across 10+ thematic pavilions, offering live demonstrations in healthcare, agriculture, education, smart cities, and climate technology.
Global CEO Perspectives and Commitments

Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google & Alphabet

Sundar Pichai delivered one of the summit's most powerful keynotes, reflecting on his student journey from Chennai to IIT Kharagpur to illustrate India's breathtaking transformation. He declared that AI represents the biggest platform shift of our lifetimes and that no technology has him dreaming bigger. Pichai warned that the world cannot allow a digital divide to become an AI divide, and emphasised that this requires investing in computing infrastructure and connectivity.

Underscoring Google's $15 billion infrastructure commitment, Pichai highlighted Visakhapatnam's emergence as a global AI hub. He announced the America-India Connect fibre-optic initiative, new partnerships with the Indian government under the Google Center for Climate Technology, a landmark partnership with Karmayogi Bharat to train civil servants in AI, and an AI Professional Certificate programme in partnership with Wadhwani AI. Google's SynthID verification feature, used over 20 million times since November, was also highlighted as a key safeguard against AI-generated misinformation.

Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated that India is expected to become one of the world's largest AI markets, citing its scale, developer ecosystem, and rapid adoption. He underscored India's strategic importance in shaping global AI development and deployment. OpenAI's landmark collaboration with TCS to build 100 MW of dedicated AI compute infrastructure in India was a centrepiece announcement, signalling long-term investment in India's AI capacity.

Dario Amodei, CEO, Anthropic

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei declared that India will play an 'absolutely central role' in shaping the future of artificial intelligence, citing the country's scale, democratic framework, and deep technical talent pool. He described AI's progress as exponential likening it to a Moore's Law for intelligence and stated that AI systems are only a few years away from surpassing human cognitive abilities across a wide range of tasks.

Amodei expressed willingness to work with India on safety testing and economic research under the New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments. In a significant demonstration of commitment, Anthropic announced the opening of its new Bengaluru office its second Asian location  with Irina Ghose appointed as Managing Director for India. The company announced partnerships with Infosys for enterprise AI adoption, and with non-profits EkStep Foundation, Pratham, and Central Square Foundation to deploy AI across education, agriculture, health, and digital public infrastructure

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman, Reliance Industries

Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani made the summit's single largest individual commitment, pledging ₹10 trillion over seven years to expand AI infrastructure and services. He described AI as the defining technology of the era and highlighted Reliance's goal to build scalable systems and integrated technology platforms that will reduce the cost of intelligence for all Indians. Reliance and its telecom arm Jio combined pledged approximately $110 billion toward AI and data centre infrastructure.

Emmanuel Macron, President of France

French President Emmanuel Macron described India as central to shaping AI governance and innovation globally. Emphasising the importance of adoption and inclusivity, he stated that the smartest AI is not the most expensive one, but the one built by the people for the right purpose. Macron praised India's digital transformation as a global benchmark and affirmed France-India cooperation on responsible AI deployment.

Sunil Mittal, Chairman, Bharti Enterprises

Bharti Enterprises Chairman Sunil Mittal emphasised AI's potential to drive transformational improvements in healthcare, education, and telecom operations. He joined global CEOs and policymakers in underscoring sector-level adoption and economic transformation, arguing that AI's most powerful application is in improving service delivery and increasing efficiency across industries and public services.
India's AI Ecosystem: The IndiaAI Mission and Sovereign Ambitions
The summit shone a spotlight on the extraordinary progress of India's AI ecosystem, powered primarily by the IndiaAI Mission, launched in March 2024 with a budget outlay of ₹10,371.92 crore over five years. What began with a target of 10,000 GPUs has now achieved 38,000 GPUs — provided to startups and researchers at one-third the global average market rate — and the summit saw the announcement of an additional 20,000 GPUs.
Key pillars of the IndiaAI Mission on display at the summit:
•    IndiaAI Compute Capacity: Providing subsidised GPU access to startups and researchers.
•    AIKosh (IndiaAI Datasets Platform): A public data commons for training Indian AI models.
•    IndiaAI FutureSkills: Supporting 500 PhD scholars, 5,000 postgraduates, and 8,000 undergraduates in AI research and training.
•    IndiaAI Startup Financing: Over ₹1 billion in GPU subsidies disbursed; 12+ companies selected for foundational model development.
•    IndiaAI Startups Global Initiative: 10 Indian AI startups selected for a global acceleration programme with Station F (Paris) and HEC Paris.
•    Safe & Trusted AI: Development of India's AI Governance Guidelines and establishment of the IndiaAI Safety Institute (AISI).
•    National AI Research Grid: Announced at the summit to strengthen computing infrastructure and enable collaboration between universities, startups, and public institutions.
India's startup ecosystem was another highlight. The country hosts approximately 1.8 lakh startups, and nearly 89% of new startups launched in 2024 incorporated AI into their products or services. According to the Stanford AI Index Report 2025, India leads global AI talent acquisition with approximately 33% annual hiring growth and ranks among the top three in the Global AI Vibrancy Tool. India's AI-powered technology sector is projected to generate revenues of around $280 billion in 2025.

The Seven Chakras: India's Framework for Global AI Action

The summit organised its deliberations through seven interconnected thematic working groups, called 'Chakras', drawing participation from over 100 countries. Each Chakra translates the summit's guiding principles into concrete areas of multilateral action:
•    Human Capital: Building AI skills and talent pipelines, closing the digital divide in education and workforce development.
•    Inclusion: Ensuring AI serves populations across languages, geographies, and economic strata, with a focus on gender equity and the Global South.
•    Trust: Developing governance frameworks, safety standards, and accountability mechanisms for responsible AI.
•    Resilience: Strengthening AI infrastructure against systemic risks, cybersecurity threats, and dependencies.
•    Science: Advancing open AI research, fostering collaboration between academia and industry, and promoting interdisciplinary innovation.
•    Resources: Democratising access to compute, data, and AI infrastructure, reducing inequalities in AI capability.
•    Social Good: Directing AI toward solving humanity's greatest challenges in healthcare, agriculture, climate, and governance.

India's Emerging Role in Global AI Governance

The summit's most lasting impact may be its contribution to reshaping global AI governance. As the first Global South host of the AI summit series, India has positioned itself not as a rule-taker but as a rule-maker. The New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments represent a tangible policy deliverable that aligns global AI development with inclusive and ethical principles.

India announced the creation of an AI Governance Group (AIGG) to coordinate overall policy development and align AI governance with national priorities, as well as a Technology and Policy Expert Committee (TPEC) to provide expert inputs on national and international AI governance. The IndiaAI Safety Institute (AISI) was tasked with undertaking research, drafting standards, developing testing methods and benchmarks, and providing technical guidance to regulators and industry.
A notable policy shift was the government's declared intention to attract global data to reside in India, be processed in India, and deliver high-value services to the world. IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw also signalled the government's commitment to working with industry and academia to upskill and reskill India's workforce for the 'new intelligence age.'

India's LLM Landscape: Building Indigenous Intelligence

One of the most compelling narratives of the summit was India's decisive shift toward building its own large language models. The IndiaAI Mission selected 12 organisations to develop foundational AI models on Indian datasets, with four startups  Sarvam AI, Soket AI, Gnani AI, and Gan AI at the vanguard of this effort. The models unveiled at the summit Sarvam-30B, Sarvam-105B, Gnani Vachana TTS/STT, and BharatGen Param2 17B  collectively represent the most significant deployment of made-in-India AI systems to date.

What distinguishes these models from earlier efforts is their orientation toward India's linguistic and cultural reality. With 22 official scheduled languages, India presents AI challenges that global models  predominantly trained on English-language data are ill-equipped to address. India's sovereign LLMs are being built on Indian datasets spanning financial documents, literature, newspapers, historical texts, and government records, enabling them to understand India's scripts, dialects, and code-switching patterns (such as 'Hinglish').

The shift also signals a maturing of India's AI ambitions. Earlier models like Sarvam-M (May 2025) drew criticism for being built on top of Mistral Small, a French base model. The new Sarvam-105B, by contrast, was trained entirely from scratch on domestic infrastructure  addressing the critique and demonstrating genuine foundational model independence. Similarly, BharatGen's Param2 17B was developed in collaboration with NVIDIA but anchored in Indian institutional leadership through IIT Bombay.

Controversies and Critical Perspectives

No summit of this scale is without its controversies. The most widely covered incident involved Galgotias University, which showcased a surveillance robotic dog called 'Orion' at its expo pavilion. The robot was subsequently identified as a commercially available Unitree Go2 manufactured by Chinese robotics company Unitree, purchasable for approximately ₹2.5 lakh. After backlash went viral on social media, the university reversed course; government sources confirmed the university was directed to vacate its expo stall on Day 3.

On a broader level, critics including the Internet Freedom Foundation raised concerns that the summit's emphasis on optics and investment figures risks obscuring deeper questions about AI's equity impact in India's Global South context. The contrast between Silicon Valley CEOs arriving at a summit where last-minute infrastructure repairs had displaced homeless residents along the route and the summit's stated theme of AI for inclusive growth was noted by commentators as a tension that India must grapple with in translating summit commitments into reality.
Conclusion: India's AI Moment and What Comes Next

The India AI Impact Summit 2026 was far more than a showcase event. It was a statement of intent that India, the world's most populous nation, a democracy with massive linguistic diversity and a fast-growing technology ecosystem, intends to shape the direction of artificial intelligence for the Global South and for humanity.
The summit delivered on multiple dimensions: more than $200 billion in AI investment commitments, three sovereign AI models trained on Indian data and infrastructure, a voluntary global governance framework (the New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments), a national AI governance architecture, and an expanded compute backbone of 58,000+ GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission.

Equally significant is what the summit symbolised: the centre of gravity of global AI discourse has begun to shift. The next edition of the global AI summit, to be held in 2027, will be announced from New Delhi — carrying forward an agenda that India has now indelibly shaped.
As Prime Minister Modi declared at the summit: AI must serve all of humanity — not just those who build it, but all those it is built for. India, with its scale, its diversity, and its ambition, has now placed itself at the very centre of that promise.
Key Facts at a Glance
•    Event: India AI Impact Summit 2026 | Dates: February 16–21, 2026 | Venue: Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi
•    Visitors: 250,000+ | Countries Represented: 100+ | Heads of State: 20+ | Global CEOs: 40+
•    Total AI Investment Commitments: $200+ billion
•    Sovereign AI Models Launched: 3 (Sarvam AI 30B & 105B, Gnani Vachana TTS/STT, BharatGen Param2 17B MoE)
•    IndiaAI Mission GPU Capacity: 38,000 existing + 20,000 new = 58,000+ GPUs
•    Policy Output: New Delhi Frontier AI Commitments (voluntary global AI governance framework)
•    National Vision: MANAV Framework (Ethics, Accountability, Sovereignty, Accessibility, Legitimacy)
•    India's AI sector projected revenue (2025): ~$280 billion
•    India's AI talent hiring growth: ~33% annually (Stanford AI Index 2025)