India AI Impact Summit 2026

 

The AI Impact Summit 2026, hosted for the first time by a developing country in New Delhi on February 18-19, concluded with 88 countries and international organisations adopting the New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact, marking a significant milestone in global cooperation on artificial intelligence. Guided by the age-old Indian principle, “Sarvajan Hitaya, Sarvajan Sukhaya” (Welfare of all, happiness of all), this non-binding landmark agreement proclaims that the benefits of AI are equitably shared across humanity. It is hailed as an attempt to democratise AI-access across humanity. It’s more of an ambitious declaration, perhaps.  

Despite successfully hosting a global summit with the participation of top-notch industry leaders and Presidents and Prime Ministers of many countries, “India is not an AI superpower” is what the Economist paper has to say on India’s AI claim. Why, this is not the first time that someone slighted our claim about AI capabilities. In the recently concluded Davos meet, the Chief of the IMF almost dismissed India as a second-rate AI power. Ashwini Vaishnaw, our IT minister, sitting in the same panel, had, of course, brushed aside the IMF Chief’s comments by saying, “I don't know what the IMF's criteria are, but Stanford University ranks India third in the world in AI penetration, AI preparedness, and AI talent. It ranks second in AI talent. Therefore, your second-tier classification is incorrect. India is clearly in the first group”.

Continuing his rebuttal, Vaishnaw put forth some interesting arguments: AI leadership is not defined solely by building large models, for 95% of AI work can be done with 20-50 billion parameter models. It is in this arena that India has developed a “bouquet” for sectoral deployment. He further stated that India is building capabilities across all five layers of AI architecture, viz., application, model, chip, infrastructure, and energy. Indeed, he claimed that India would become the world's largest supplier of AI services at the application layer.

Amidst this conflicting scenario, let us first take a look at the ground realities of India’s adoption of AI technology: One survey report indicates that 90% of Indian firms are using AI compared to 62% globally. India is said to be leading the world in voice-driven AI. Sarvam AI is one such company that has come into the limelight at the summit. Adopting open-source models trained on local voice and language data, the company created Sarvam 1, a suite of open-source foundational models and AI tools meant for Indian languages. They have also launched Shuka 1.0, India’s first open-source Audio LM. This initiative can be described as part of India’s sovereign AI effort that aims to reduce its reliance on foreign AI systems. Seeing Sarvam developed local AI models, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, said: “… I just don’t see any impediments to that, and I think it is very, very well positioned”.

This is what, indeed, the political leaders of India and officials from its government agencies attempted to highlight at the summit. Abhishek Singh from India AI, a government agency, said, “We are not trying to burn millions of GPUs building artificial general intelligence,” but are aiming at becoming the world’s “adoption capital”. In a similar vein, Rudra Chaudhuri, Vice President of Observer Research Foundation (ORF), who works closely with India’s growing innovation ecosystem, commented that “India’s approach is bottom up. It’s not the model, it’s the use case that you have to build around.”

Several Indian startups have attracted global interest and investment in areas such as cloud computing and customer service. Many others are focusing on applying AI to urgent problems of the developing world. Supernova AI is one such example: This app makes English tuition affordable to all Indians who lack access to good schools and want to master their English speaking skills. It is indeed growing at a clip. Similarly, telemedicine and AI triage chatbots are expanding rapidly. It is thus evident from the foregoing that India is focusing more on applications.

That said, given the way in which frontier models are galloping along, one may wonder whether such indigenous apps will remain effective in the long run. Secondly, the cost of producing such apps may also become a veritable question. But Chaudhuri of ORF argues that many such uses will not require expensive “bleeding-edge models”. In other words, what all these developments point to is: Indian companies will have to learn how to apply AI frugally.

That is one side of India’s AI story. The other side is the abundance of enthusiastic and talented techies who are eager to work out how AI can be harnessed, as is evident from the presence of a quarter of a million attendees at the summit. Secondly, massive investments of around $200 bn are in the pipeline from Google, Amazon Web Services, Adani and Reliance, etc., to expand data centres’ capacity —the infrastructure meant to help India become an AI superpower—in the country from 1.5 GW in 2025 to 8-10 GW by 2030. Similarly, Microsoft has plans to invest about $20 bn in AI infrastructure in the country over the next few years. Of course, it is not clear whether India will benefit from these data centres, though Jensen Huang of Nvidia argues that they could be as good for India’s economy as the internet.

All these developments, plus a vast STEM talent pool of about 15% of the global AI workforce, are likely to augur well for India to become a member of the top-three global AI superpower group. Nevertheless, to reduce the gap with the US and China, India must increase its financial commitment for R&D, infrastructure development and talent retention. As Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, who participated in the summit, said in an interview with the Economic Times, “… the scale of the opportunity it [India] has with AI is immense.”  

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