Tech Explained: India AI Summit 2026: Who Controls Future Tech Order? in Simple Terms

New Delhi became the first city in the Global South to host a global artificial intelligence summit when the India AI Impact Summit 2026 opened at Bharat Mandapam on February 16. The gathering—the fourth in an annual series that began at Bletchley Park in 2023, moved to Seoul in 2024, and then to Paris in 2025—ran for six days, drew delegates from more than 118 countries, and registered over 5,00,000 attendees, making it the largest such event to date.

The summit came with a string of major announcements: a US-India strategic technology alliance, a new domestic AI governance vision, billion-dollar investment pledges from Indian conglomerates, and the adoption of a multi-nation declaration backed by 88 countries. It also came with its share of logistical embarrassment—gridlocked streets, blocked delegates, a university expo stall evicted for passing off a Chinese-made robot as an Indian innovation, and the last-minute withdrawal of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

The summit was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February 19. French President Emmanuel Macron and UN Secretary-General António Guterres both addressed the opening ceremony.

Modi used the occasion to announce India’s MANAV Vision, a framework for AI governance whose acronym—drawn from the Hindi word for human—stands for Moral and ethical systems, Accountable governance, National sovereignty, Accessible and inclusive technology, and Valid and legitimate systems.

“MANAV means human,” Modi said. “M stands for moral and ethical systems: AI should be based on ethical guidance. A stands for accountable governance: transparent rules, robust oversight. N stands for national sovereignty: whose data, his right. A stands for accessible and inclusive: AI should be a multiplier, not a monopoly. V stands for valid and legitimate: AI should be lawful and verifiable.”

He called for AI to be made more widely accessible: “We must democratise AI. It must become a tool for inclusion and empowerment, particularly for the Global South.” He also argued against AI monopolies, saying India believed technology would “only truly benefit the world when it is shared, when open-source code becomes available.”

Modi warned that deepfakes and fabricated content were “destabilising open society” and stressed child safety as a priority: “The AI space should also be child-safe and family guided.” He invited global technology leaders to “design and develop in India, deliver to the world.”

The summit concluded on February 21 with the adoption of the New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact, endorsed by 88 countries and international organisations including the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Russia, Brazil, and Australia. The non-binding declaration is structured around seven pillars—termed ‘Chakras’—covering democratising AI resources, economic growth and social good, secure and trusted AI, AI for science, social empowerment, human capital, and resilient and energy-efficient AI systems. It was the broadest multilateral consensus on AI to date.

Yet the event was not without dissent. A TechPolicy.Press analysis argued that the summit’s structure gave multinational corporations parity with sovereign governments in the plenary sessions, while civil society groups, labour leaders, and human rights defenders had no equivalent high-level platform. Amnesty International and others said the summit avoided hard conversations about harmful AI use inside India itself. The US delegation, led by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios, explicitly rejected any binding global governance framework. “We totally reject global governance of AI,” Kratsios said on the summit’s final day.

India joins Pax Silica

The summit’s most consequential diplomatic development came on February 20, when India formally signed the Pax Silica Declaration—a US-led strategic alliance aimed at building resilient supply chains for critical minerals, semiconductors, and AI infrastructure. The signing took place on the sidelines of the summit. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw signed for India; US Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment Jacob Helberg, and US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor, signed for the United States.

India also signed a Joint Statement on the ‘India-US AI Opportunity Partnership’ as a bilateral addendum to the declaration.

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Pax Silica was launched on December 12, 2025, at a summit in Washington. Its founding declaration commits member nations to cooperation across the full technology stack—from raw materials through semiconductor fabrication to AI deployment infrastructure—with the stated goal of reducing overconcentration in supply chains and preventing economic coercion. Current members include Australia, Greece, Israel, Japan, Qatar, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.

India was not part of the original group. Its absence had fuelled speculation about trade tensions with Washington; those tensions eased after India and the US reached an interim trade deal last month that lowered US tariffs on Indian imports from 25 per cent to 18 per cent, and after India agreed to stop buying discounted Russian crude oil. Helberg had maintained at the time of the alliance’s launch that member selection was based on supply-chain roles, not diplomatic friction.

Vaishnaw pointed to India’s semiconductor capacity as the basis for its entry: “Our semiconductor industry has evolved well in the last decade. Today, we are designing 2-nanometer chips. It is very important to position India as a trusted country the entire world would like to partner with.”

Gor was more direct about the alliance’s underlying logic: “Pax Silica is about whether free societies will control the commanding heights of the global economy.”

India currently has 10 semiconductor plants at various stages of development, with commercial production expected soon.

Investments, deals, and some unease

The summit generated an extraordinary volume of investment announcements, though analysts were quick to note that pledges are not the same as disbursements, and that US tech giants are expected to spend over $630 billion on AI globally in 2026 alone—dwarfing India’s announced totals.

The two largest domestic pledges came from Reliance Industries and the Adani Group. Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani committed Rs 10 lakh crore (roughly $110 billion) over seven years to build AI and data infrastructure, centred on a multi-gigawatt data centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat, with over 120 MW expected to come online in the second half of 2026. Adani committed $100 billion by 2035 to build renewable-energy-powered hyperscale data centres, projecting that this would draw an additional $150 billion in related industries.

On the technology company side, OpenAI signed a partnership with the Tata Group to build 100 MW of AI infrastructure in India, scalable to 1 GW, as part of the global Stargate initiative. Tata Consultancy Services also became OpenAI’s first customer for its data centre unit. Anthropic opened a new office in Bengaluru—its second in Asia after Tokyo—and announced a partnership with Infosys to deploy Claude models in Indian enterprises, beginning with the telecommunications sector. Anthropic Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dario Amodei described India as having “an absolutely central role” in shaping the future of AI.

Microsoft said it was on course to invest $50 billion in AI across the Global South by the end of the decade. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new subsea cable initiative to improve AI connectivity between India and the US, and said his company was establishing an AI hub in Visakhapatnam.

BharatGen—India’s first government-funded large language model initiative, built in collaboration with the India Today Group and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology—launched Param2, a 17-billion-parameter model capable of operating across 22 Indian languages. At the summit, BharatGen also unveiled Sutra, an AI-powered news anchor designed to synthesise real-time policy discussions into structured news reports in multiple languages. Sarvam AI released a series of new models, including a vision model for optical character recognition, a dubbing model, and a speech-to-text model, and teased smart glasses under the name Sarvam Kaze.

Mumbai-based AI company Fractal launched Vaidya 2.0, a healthcare reasoning model that the company claims scores 50.1 on OpenAI’s HealthBench (hard) benchmark—which, if verified by independent reviewers, would make it the first AI model to exceed 50 on that measure, ahead of OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini Pro 3. The model is designed to support emergency triage, symptom checking, and end-to-end patient journey management. Fractal is a partner company under India’s Rs 10,300-crore India AI Mission. The benchmark claim has not been independently verified at the time of writing.

Despite the scale of these announcements, critics warned of structural limits. India still lacks frontier computing infrastructure, chip manufacturing, and the large-scale data centres needed to train competitive models. Some researchers also cautioned that India risked becoming a ‘data colony’—supplying training data and skilled labour while foreign companies retain ownership of the most valuable AI platforms. Startup funding in India fell in 2025, and several founders flagged slow government execution, including delays in a planned $1.1-billion AI venture fund.

Water was another concern raised at the summit, and outside it. A medium-sized data centre can consume approximately 11 lakh litres of water per day. India faces acute and worsening water stress; Bengaluru, where dozens of data centres are already operating, experiences severe urban water cuts each summer. Modi’s invitation for the world’s data to “reside in India” drew immediate pushback from environmental quarters.

The UN, governance, and an awkward photo

Guterres delivered the summit’s sharpest line. Addressing the opening session, he warned that the future of AI “cannot be decided by a handful of countries—or left to the whims of a few billionaires.” He called on technology companies to support a $3-billion global fund to ensure open access to AI for all countries. He also announced that the UN’s Independent International Scientific Panel on AI—comprising 40 experts—had been formally appointed to support evidence-based policymaking, and that a global dialogue on AI governance would hold its first session in Geneva in July.

Macron emphasised Europe’s position as both a regulatory and an innovation space: “Europe is not blindly focused on regulation—Europe is a space for innovation and investment, but it is a safe space.”

Guterres’ warning about billionaires landed with particular resonance on a day when Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates withdrew from a scheduled keynote just hours before he was due to speak. The Gates Foundation said the decision was made “to ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit’s key priorities,” without elaborating. Gates was travelling in India and had been confirmed as a speaker less than 48 hours earlier. The withdrawal came as renewed attention focused on his past ties to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, following the release of US Department of Justice files in January. Gates has not been accused of wrongdoing by any of Epstein’s victims. A Gates Foundation official spoke in his place. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang also cancelled his appearance, leaving two of the summit’s most anticipated speakers absent on its highest-profile day.

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The day also produced a moment that spread rapidly on social media: when Modi prompted the technology executives on stage to join hands in a gesture of solidarity, all complied—except OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Amodei, who stood side by side but kept their fists raised separately. The two men lead the fiercest rivalry in AI; Altman had recently called Anthropic “dishonest” and “authoritarian” after the company ran Super Bowl advertisements criticising OpenAI’s plan to introduce advertising into ChatGPT.

Also present at the summit but conspicuously subdued was China. The world’s second-largest AI power sent no senior government delegation; its absence coincided with Chinese New Year, though observers noted the timing also reflected China’s broadly cautious approach to multilateral AI forums dominated by the United States.

What the summit resolved—and what it left open

The New Delhi Declaration was the summit’s formal output. Unlike earlier summits, which focused on AI safety and risk, the declaration reflected the host nation’s priorities: access, development, and the distribution of AI’s benefits to poorer countries. Its seven pillars were framed around opportunity rather than caution. It carried no binding obligations.

Jakob Mökander, director of science and technology policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, captured what many delegates felt: “Long term, it’s good for the world that AI is not just viewed as a race between the US and China, and I think that India is right now the player that most confidently says, ‘We reject this dynamic.’”

Last year, India rose to third place in Stanford University’s annual Global AI Vibrancy Tool ranking of AI competitiveness—a jump that the summit’s organisers cited repeatedly. But as the The New York Times noted during the event, “India brims with tech talent but not the companies that command it.”

The expo was extended by a day and concluded on February 21, after drawing crowds far larger than anticipated. The summit was the first in the series to be held outside a G7 nation. Whether its outputs translate into durable policy or infrastructure—rather than declarations and photo opportunities—is a question that will take considerably longer to answer.

With inputs from agencies.