India is hosting a five-day AI Impact Summit in New Delhi beginning Monday that has drawn top executives from major AI labs and Big Tech companies alongside heads of state, positioning the country to play a central role in global AI governance as the first major international AI meeting hosted in the Global South.
The event, expecting 250,000 visitors at Bharat Mandapam, features Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Nvidia representatives, Microsoft executives, and Cloudflare leadership alongside Indian business heavyweights including Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani and tech pioneer Nandan Nilekani.
Political Leaders Signal Strategic Importance
Political leaders attending include French President Emmanuel Macron, who is scheduled to deliver a speech Thursday with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with Sheikh Khaled bin Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The high-level political participation underscores India's ambition to position itself as a central player in global AI debates rather than simply a consumer market.
The summit coincides with a wave of major AI infrastructure and partnership announcements demonstrating India's rapid emergence as a strategic compute destination. Adani Group revealed Tuesday a $100 billion investment to build renewable-powered AI data centers by 2035, while Blackstone announced Monday it is leading a $1.2 billion investment in Indian AI cloud startup Neysa to deploy more than 20,000 GPUs.
From Periphery to Strategic Player
India has been on the periphery of the global AI boom due to limited chip manufacturing capability, making data centers and AI infrastructure the country's best opportunity to establish relevance on the global stage. The summit reflects a strategic pivot as global AI companies recognize India's massive user base and young population as critical to their expansion plans.
Sam Altman revealed Sunday that India has 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, making it OpenAI's second-largest market after the United States and home to the largest number of student ChatGPT users globally. Anthropic opened its first India office in Bengaluru this week, announcing that India accounts for approximately 6% of global Claude usage, second only to the US.
IndiaAI Mission and Sovereign Compute Push
The summit amplifies voices of developing nations in global AI governance, with the Indian government's IndiaAI Mission designed to expand compute capacity, support startups, and accelerate multilingual AI applications in healthcare, agriculture, and public services. The focus on data sovereignty and indigenous AI capabilities runs through multiple announcements at the summit.
Adani's data centers will include dedicated computing capacity for Indian large language models and startups, while Neysa focuses on "sovereign compute" aligned with IndiaAI Mission goals. Former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant urged India to develop its own AI systems rather than relying on foreign platforms, despite ChatGPT's massive adoption.
Industry Disruption Fears Surface
The summit also confronts difficult questions about AI's impact on India's $280 billion IT services industry. HCL CEO Vineet Nayyar said Indian IT companies will focus on turning profits rather than being job creators, while Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, predicted industries like IT services and business process outsourcing could "almost completely disappear" within five years due to AI.
Despite these disruption fears, major partnerships announced at the summit position Indian IT giants to play central roles in AI deployment. Infosys partnered with Anthropic to integrate Claude models with its Topaz platform for enterprise AI solutions, while AMD teamed with Tata Consultancy Services to develop rack-scale AI infrastructure.
The summit runs through February 20, with additional announcements expected as global AI companies seek to establish deeper presence in a market that has rapidly become too large and strategically important to ignore. For India, the event marks a transition from technology importer to potential AI superpower shaping how the technology develops globally.
