India’s AI Summit: Where big ambitions met harsh realities

[SINGAPORE] India’s AI Impact Summit 2026 was touted as a coming-of-age moment for India as it seeks to enter the global artificial intelligence (AI) race dominated by competition between the US and China.

Instead, the summit presented a much more complex picture, highlighting both the country’s ambitions to innovate and demonstrate leadership and the constraints of infrastructure bottlenecks and dependence on foreign technology.

Logistical issues took away the shine from the event. Certification glitches, last-minute schedule changes, VIP moves that cut off access for attendees and exhibitors, long lines inside the venue, and traffic jams dulled the summit’s luster.

An Indian university was evicted from a summit over a virus incident after one of its officials falsely claimed to Indian media that a Chinese-made robot dog was its own invention.

Despite all this, the message from the summit was that India is open to AI business and is more than just a market for tech giants.

“The whole intention and objective was to really demonstrate the seriousness of India in the AI ​​space,” said Renthala Chandrashekhar, Chairman, Center for Digital Futures.

This is about “both technology creation and product development, and the application of AI to address larger, enduring economic and human development issues,” he added.

Despite “a lot of noise”, the message got through that India is pursuing these goals, said Chandrashekhar, a former top official at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology.

The announcement of deals worth billions of dollars reinforced this message.

Asia’s richest man, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, has pledged to invest around US$110 billion over the next seven years in building AI and data infrastructure in India.

Indian conglomerate Adani Enterprises has announced that it will invest US$100 billion to build AI-enabled data centers powered by renewable energy by 2035.

Partnerships were established, including Tata Consultancy Services partnering with OpenAI to build AI infrastructure and Infosys partnering with US-based Anthropic to provide AI solutions to companies across telecoms, financial services, manufacturing, and software development.

Meanwhile, Nvidia announced partnerships with three cloud computing providers in India to provide advanced processors for data centers that can train and run AI systems.

All these indicate that India is entering the AI ​​race, said former minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar, asserting that “the capabilities and capabilities that exist in India’s research and innovation ecosystem are robust.”

Chandrasekhar, leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and former electronics and information technology minister, added:

“It’s not easy because there are kind of walls and moats that the US and China have built around their products and LLMs. But it’s a race we have to run.”

LLMs, or large-scale language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and China’s DeepSeek, are AI systems designed to understand, process, and generate human language.

India is ChatGPT’s second largest market, with 100 million weekly users.

But competition is heating up, and Indian startup Sarvam AI wants to give generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude a competitive edge.

The company announced two models built and trained using local datasets that are more culturally adapted to Indians in terms of language and culture.

Prepare for the AI ​​leap

Vanessa Smith, a speaker at the summit and CEO of ServiceNow, an American company that provides a cloud-based platform for automated business workflows, said, “India’s power is its population and the amount of data that can be leveraged to drive (AI) models.”

“Think about it: AI cannot do anything unless it is trained with the right data.”

India also has a track record of building IT services that can be leveraged for AI systems. Given India’s diverse linguistic and cultural diversity, any application developed in India can be exported to countries in the Global South, experts said.

At the summit, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked about how technology developed in India can help other countries, arguing that “AI models that are successful in India can be deployed anywhere in the world.”

The summit, held in New Delhi from Monday (February 16) to Saturday, was the fourth of its kind, following similar annual conferences in the UK, South Korea and France to discuss the challenges and opportunities posed by AI.

The more than 70,000 attendees included government delegations, world leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron, and industry players including top technology executives such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Google’s Sundar Pichai.

India hosted the gathering at a time when AI adoption is accelerating around the world, raising questions about safety, unemployment and ethics amid the rise of agent-based AI systems. Advances in AI have already made many jobs unnecessary, including traditional white-collar roles.

hurdles to overcome

The main objective of the summit was to “bring the perspective of the Global South into a space increasingly dominated by the great powers (the US and China),” said Professor Harsh V. Pant, deputy director of the Observer Research Foundation, a think tank in New Delhi.

He said the key message from the summit is that AI needs to be more inclusive and democratic, and that “the technological divides we’ve seen with other technologies should not be replicated with AI.”

A significant challenge for India is that the AI ​​ecosystem remains dominated by the US and China, who seek to protect their AI models.

India has moved closer to the United States in recent years, even as it remains distrustful of China, with whom it has a disputed border.

The South Asian country’s nascent semiconductor chip industry remains dependent on foreign AI stacks (the software, tools, and models on which AI systems are built) and processors.

India on Friday joined the US-led Pax Silica Initiative, which aims to strengthen resilient supply chains for critical minerals and AI. This move appears to be an attempt by India to avoid China’s dominance in these areas.

However, even as it deepens its technical cooperation, India faces challenges in maintaining its strategic autonomy, including dealing with pressure from its closest partners.

At a Tony Blair Institute event during the summit, White House senior policy adviser on AI Sriram Krishnan made clear how the US wants India to continue using US technology.

Krishnan said that while Indian companies will need to localize their applications, “At the end of the day, we want the U.S. AI stack to be the foundation on which everyone builds.”

India also needs to act quickly to strengthen its infrastructure in line with its AI ambitions. First, powering AI data centers requires vast amounts of energy and water resources.

Vivek Agarwal, country director for India at the Tony Blair Institute, said India is “currently responding fairly well to its energy needs”.

“However, the amount of energy that data centers and AI centers typically use tends to be quite high, so it will be important to ensure that[the energy demand is met],” he added, noting that India’s recent efforts to promote nuclear energy are a “huge step” in that direction.

The summit succeeded in elevating India’s voice in the global discussion on AI technology and at the same time highlighted India’s potential in this field.

“We had the right people at the (summit) venue: the private sector, academia, government, developed countries as well as developing countries,” Agarwal said.

“The United States is leading the way (in the AI ​​race) with Nvidia and others, but China will probably catch up quickly. And the third country to catch up will probably be India. And no one disputes that it will take a lot of effort, both inside and outside of government.”