On 16 February 2026, India opened the most ambitious AI event the Global South has ever hosted at Bharat Mandapam, New Delhi the India AI Impact Summit 2026. Over 70,000 people attended in person, 300,000+ registered, and the guest list included 20+ heads of state, 60+ ministers and 500+ AI leaders from around the world.
This was not “another AI conference.” It was a statement: India does not just want to participate in global AI it wants to help lead it.
1. Why this summit is different
Previous global AI summits were hosted in the UK (Bletchley Park, 2023), South Korea (Seoul, 2024) and France (Paris, 2025), all focused heavily on AI safety and regulation in advanced economies. India reframed the conversation from “safety” and “action” to impact how AI can solve real problems for real people at population scale.
The summit is built on three Sutras People, Planet, Progress and seven Chakras (Resilience & Efficiency, Human Capital, Safe & Trusted AI, Science, Democratizing AI Resources, Inclusion, AI for Economic Growth & Social Good). These are not just discussion tracks but multinational working groups tasked with concrete deliverables, explicitly addressing criticism that earlier summits produced declarations without delivery.
PM Modi anchored the vision in the principle “Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya” welfare and happiness for all signalling that India’s AI ambition is rooted in civilisational values, not just GDP targets.
2. India’s strategic AI positioning
Day 1 made four positions clear:
1️⃣ Sovereign AI builder India will build, train, host and govern its own foundational models on its own compute and with its own data. Sovereign LLMs like BharatGen and other Indic‑language models are being funded with hundreds of crores to ensure independence, cultural relevance and data security.
2️⃣ Global South convenor India is positioning itself as the country that can help other emerging markets avoid “missing the AI revolution” the way some missed earlier industrial waves. Digital public infrastructure like Aadhaar, UPI and BHASHINI becomes the base layer, with AI now being added on top as a shared resource rather than a proprietary privilege.
3️⃣ A ‘third way’ in governance India is carving out a middle path between the EU’s regulation first model and the US/China innovation race, signalling: enable first, regulate surgically.
4️⃣ Deployment first nation Day 1 was built around live systems, not slideware working deployments across health, agriculture, education, finance, justice, climate, smart cities, safety and language tech. The recurring line in sessions: “Show me working AI, not a whitepaper.”
3. Governance: innovation over restraint
The intellectual backbone of Day 1 was the India AI Governance Guidelines issued by MeitY in late 2025. They rest on seven principles: trust, people‑first, innovation over restraint, fairness, accountability, explainability and safety/sustainability across the AI lifecycle.
Crucially, India has decided against a separate AI law for now, choosing to rely on existing regulations, targeted amendments and voluntary standards instead of a comprehensive AI Act. For CXOs, this sharpens the contrast with the EU AI Act: Europe classifies risk and regulates accordingly; India offers lighter, innovation‑friendly guardrails and a clear “open for AI business” signal.
Civil society and think tanks did voice concerns from the risk of under‑protection for vulnerable communities to questions about liability and surveillance when sovereign AI is layered onto digital public infrastructure. The debate is not closed; it has just started at scale.
4. Sovereign AI infrastructure: the hard numbers
India backed its narrative with a serious infrastructure roadmap:
- 38,000+ high‑end GPUs already deployed under the IndiaAI Mission, priced at about ₹65 per GPU‑hour to democratise access.
- Target of 100,000+ GPUs by end 2026, with 20,000 already in the pipeline and more on order.
- Over ₹900 crore earmarked for sovereign foundation models like BharatGen and others.
- A broader AI investment ambition of $200B+ over the next two years, including domestic chip manufacturing (e.g., Micron India).
This is framed as a “whole of nation” strategy to build a frugal, sovereign and scalable AI ecosystem where compute is a public utility, not a luxury reserved for hyperscalers and BigTech.
The launch of the UPI One World wallet during the summit allowing visitors from 40+ countries to pay digitally without an Indian bank account served as a live proof of India’s ability to export digital rails globally.
5. India AI Impact Expo: scale, pavilions and standout demos
Running alongside the summit, the India AI Impact Expo became the largest AI showcase India has organised:
- 70,000+ m² across 10 arenas
- 840+ exhibitors and 600+ curated startups
- 13 country pavilions, including an Africa‑wide pavilion
- 500+ sessions and 3,250+ speakers across the summit programme
On Day 1, 250,000 students took a pledge to use AI responsibly – submitted for Guinness World Records recognition.
🇩🇪 German Pavilion (Hall 14, Booth 14.4) For European leaders, the German Pavilion is a key signal. Organised by the Indo‑German Chamber of Commerce (IGCC) with support from BMDS and BMZ, it showcased players like Siemens Energy, Fraunhofer, DE‑CIX Interwire India, Krones Digital, Nelpx, Uniper, TU Dresden, NRW.Global Business, WorkForce, Rohde & Schwarz, GTAI and GIZ.
GIZ’s FAIR Forward initiative also launched a voice‑AI policy report and developer toolkit with Indian partners like ARTPARK, Trilegal and BHASHINI, underlining how deeply Germany is engaging with India’s AI ecosystem.
🔍 Standout pavilion experiences included:
- Jio Intelligence Pavilion – live demos of Jio’s AI stack, Sanskriti AI holograms, Arogya (health), Shiksha (education) and AI Home.
- Google’s AI Cricket Coach – a full pitch where Gemini analyses batting technique and returns an instant coaching report.
- Sarvam AI’s Kaze Smart Glasses – Made in India AI glasses with real time perception and Indic language understanding, positioned against global competitors.
- Ottonomy’s autonomous delivery ecosystem – L4 ground robots, smart pods and drones running on NVIDIA edge platforms.
- WAVES Creators’ Corner – media and AVGC‑XR startups from zero touch newsrooms to multilingual dubbing and AI driven storytelling.
6. Where AI is already deployed
Day 1 functioned as a deployment catalogue rather than a future‑gazing exercise. Highlighted use cases included:
- Healthcare – AI‑assisted TB and cancer screening, neurological diagnostics, voice‑to‑EMR in Indian languages, and clinical decision support for Tier 2/3 cities.
- Agriculture – AI for sowing, irrigation, yield prediction, logistics and cold chain optimisation; Kisan e‑Mitra handling ~20,000 farmer queries per day.
- Education – adaptive learning tools, vernacular first platforms and curricula focused on reasoning and AI literacy.
- Financial inclusion – alternative credit scoring for gig workers and MSMEs, and AI powered fraud detection in UPI and digital payments.
- Judiciary – case summarisation, precedent search, scheduling support and corruption pattern detection.
- Climate & environment – AI based monsoon/flood prediction, emissions tracking and disaster early warning systems.
- Smart cities & road safety – predictive maintenance, traffic optimisation, waste and energy management, computer vision based safety systems.
- Language AI – Indic LLMs, speech and translation systems (Sarvam, BharatGen, BHASHINI) treated as core public infrastructure for governance, health and education.
- Defence & security – discussions around autonomous systems, crime hotspot prediction and the link between compute sovereignty and strategic autonomy.
- Jobs & workforce – strong focus on upskilling, AI literacy and “Create in India” workforce initiatives, with clear warnings that the window to act is limited.
7. Five signals for global leaders
For CEOs, policymakers and institutional leaders, Day 1 sends five clear signals:
1️⃣ AI as public infrastructure is here India is building AI rails the way it built UPI as open, shared infrastructure (models, datasets, voice stacks, GPUs) accessible far beyond BigTech.
2️⃣ Governance divergence will shape strategy You now need to navigate at least two distinct regulatory philosophies: the EU AI Act’s risk‑tiered constraints and India’s “innovation over restraint” approach.
3️⃣ Sovereign AI is backed by real capital ₹65/hour GPUs, national LLM funding, and domestic chip capacity mean sovereignty is not just a speech line it is becoming an architectural requirement for those building in and with India.
4️⃣ The Global South AI market is scaling fast 840+ exhibitors, 600+ startups and 4,650+ challenge applications from 60+ countries show that India is becoming the proving ground for AI designed for emerging markets.
5️⃣ Germany–India AI ties are already operational From the German Pavilion to GIZ/BMZ events on climate and development, the Indo‑German AI corridor is live at institutional, corporate and research level not a future opportunity but a current one.