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NEW DELHI – On the surface, the big AI summit held in India this week seemed like a common sight. World leaders and technology executives gathered in New Delhi to announce high-profile investment figures and carefully worded joint statements. This is the largest global AI summit to date and the first to be held in the Global South.
I was on the ground throughout the summit’s closed-door meetings, bilateral events, and formal signings. While most coverage focused on press releases and piecemeal deal announcements, there was something much more strategic going on.
President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands before their meeting at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, February 25, 2020. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
Within days, the United States had quietly finalized a complete strategy for the Global South on how emerging economies would deploy artificial intelligence, how to finance it, and how to secure it. The US is combining AI penetration with supply chain security and anchoring both in India, marking a shift in how it projects its technological leadership at a time when domestic politics have turned inward. This system consists of two parts.
The first is the supply chain and critical resources aspect with Pax Silica. US Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, US Ambassador to India Sergio Goh and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios all appeared in New Delhi to sign the agreement welcoming India to Pax Silica. The Declaration formalizes cooperation across critical minerals, semiconductor manufacturing, energy, and data center infrastructure, and explicitly links economic resilience to national security.
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Helberg framed the effort as a response to what he called “weaponized dependence,” arguing on stage that “economic security is national security” and that modern sovereignty comes from the ability to build “from minerals deep in the earth to silicon wafers to the intelligence that powers our AI systems.” Go then clarified that India’s participation is not “symbolic” but “strategic and essential,” linking the effort directly to broader U.S.-India trade, technology, and defense cooperation. His words were unusually direct.
The second arm was announced at a press conference shortly thereafter, but received relatively little attention. Secretary Kratsios outlined a new AI export stack that represents a new phase in U.S. AI policy. It is a coordinated effort to export the U.S. AI ecosystem at scale, supported by funding, standards-setting, and implementation assistance. “We want to share America’s great technology stack with the world,” he said, stressing that leadership in AI depends not just on who invents it, but whose systems are adopted widely enough to become the default.
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This framework helps explain why this was initiated in New Delhi rather than Washington. India designed the summit around adoption, not abstraction, and intentionally included leaders from the Global South, frontier AI companies, and multilateral financial institutions. Indian officials emphasized enforcement constraints and sovereignty over alignment of values. Highlighting the talent shortage in semiconductors, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnau said the global industry needs “about one million more skilled professionals” and that India is addressing this issue through a nationwide program across hundreds of universities, alongside free access to advanced chip design tools from companies such as Synopsys, Cadence and Siemens.
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All US officials present emphasized India’s important role. Most emerging economies are connected to a single link in the technology value chain: minerals, low-cost assembly, or consumption. India operates across the stack. U.S. officials have repeatedly emphasized that India brings a growing scale of engineering talent, active participation in advanced chip design, a growing domestic AI product ecosystem, potential for population-level deployment, and the ability to absorb large infrastructure investments in data centers and energy. India is therefore not just a market, but a stabilizing node for both the proliferation of AI and an increasingly centralized and diversified supply chain.
The summit highlighted issues in the Global South that Washington has often avoided addressing directly. Artificial intelligence is no longer a separate field. This is the infrastructure layer of the future economy. Infrastructure requires secure inputs, energy, standards, skilled labor and sustainable capital. Countries that cannot deploy AI at scale will have little influence over how it is managed. They inherit systems designed elsewhere. Regulation without participation provides neither sovereignty nor stability.
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The US response outlined in New Delhi reflects a recognition of that reality. America’s AI ecosystem is positioned as a foundation on which others can build, rather than a closed platform that must be borrowed from. Financing tools across multiple institutions, including the U.S. Development Finance Corporation and the Export-Import Bank, are being tailored to lower barriers to adoption. Companies from partner countries are integrated into and cross-sold into the system, rather than being excluded from it. Standards, especially for next-generation AI agents, are being developed early, and Kratsios points out that interoperability will determine whether AI scales smoothly or becomes fragmented.
Pax Silica and the AI Export Program – These two tracks move together and aim to form a loop between capabilities and resilience.
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With over $250 billion in AI deals announced in New Delhi, it was clear that the market seems to recognize the direction travel is heading. Microsoft has committed to investing approximately $50 billion in AI infrastructure across the Global South by the end of 2020. OpenAI and AMD announced a partnership with India’s Tata Group related to AI infrastructure and deployment. Blackstone participates in $600 million funding for Indian AI infrastructure company Neisa, while NVIDIA expands venture partnerships across India. Indian conglomerates Reliance and Adani have separately outlined major data center investments spanning multiple gigawatts of capacity.
As U.S. domestic politics becomes more tense ahead of the midterm elections, the White House is clearly trying to lock in a parallel agenda overseas, one that is not dependent on the domestic legislative cycle or race to the top. The Global South, where the adoption of AI will determine decades of growth trajectories and political alignments, is now at the center of that effort. The United States no longer relies solely on innovation to maintain technological leadership. As the United States shifts its focus inward, it is building its deployment architecture, securing its physical infrastructure, and expanding both outward.
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