When India hosted the AI Impact Summit 2026 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, it did more than organise a large conference. It became the first Global South nation to host this prestigious series of summits, following earlier editions in Bletchley Park, Seoul, and Paris. The message was deliberate: India is no longer content to watch the AI revolution unfold from the sidelines.
The scale was striking. More than 5,000 delegates attended, with over 700 sessions spanning policy, research, industry, and public engagement tracks. World leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and UN Secretary-General António Guterres, addressed the opening ceremony. For a country still navigating the complexities of development, hosting this calibre of event carries real geopolitical weight.
India’s pitch to the world rested on a clear framework. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw outlined a “frugal, sovereign and scalable” AI strategy, signalling that India intends to build AI infrastructure on its own terms. This framing matters. As the US and China together control roughly 85% of global AI computing power, smaller nations face pressure to align with one camp or the other. India is trying to carve out a third path.
The domestic groundwork backing this ambition is real. The IndiaAI Mission has deployed 38,000 GPUs and established 600 AI Data Labs, with three Centres of Excellence focused on healthcare, agriculture, and sustainable cities. Private investment is also pouring in. Google announced $15 billion for AI infrastructure, while Microsoft confirmed it is on track to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to bring AI to lower-income countries. These are not trivial commitments.
Yet, the summit also exposed tensions that no headline announcement can paper over. Senior White House policy adviser Sriram Krishnan drew criticism after suggesting that the American AI stack should be the “bedrock” on which its allies build. Critics pushed back sharply, arguing that India must develop its own foundational models to avoid strategic dependency. The applause and the unease existed in the same room.
On the employment front, the picture is equally complicated. NASSCOM projects the Indian IT sector will add 1 million AI-related jobs, yet Tata Consultancy Services cut 12,200 jobs as automation accelerated, and major software exporters hired only 70,000 to 80,000 fresh engineers in 2024-25, the lowest intake in over two decades. The promise of AI-driven job creation and the reality of displacement are running in parallel.
The summit also faced logistical criticism. Reports of poor organisation, traffic chaos, and at least one incident where a foreign robot was presented as an indigenous product drew unwanted attention. These are not just optics problems. They reflect a gap between India’s aspirational narrative and its current execution capacity.
None of this diminishes what the summit represented. India used this platform to assert that AI governance must reflect the needs of the developing world, not just Silicon Valley or Beijing. That argument is both legitimate and necessary. The harder task now is turning summit momentum into durable policy, genuine sovereignty, and innovation that reaches the millions still outside the formal economy. The world was watching. The next chapter depends entirely on what India does next.
