From compute to control, India stakes its claim in the AI era

New Delhi became the nerve centre of the global AI conversation this week as the India AI Impact Summit 2026 opened at Bharat Mandapam. For the first time, some of the world’s most powerful technology leaders gathered in the Global South to discuss the future of artificial intelligence. The message was clear: AI needs India as much as India needs AI.

In a world grappling with economic fragmentation and technological concentration, India positioned itself not merely as a participant but as a co-architect of the next computing era. Across keynote sessions, a clear industry trend emerged: the race is no longer only about building smarter models. It is about creating sovereign, inclusive, and scalable AI ecosystems underpinned by energy, compute, and governance.

Sovereignty, Scale and the Infrastructure Race

Prime Minister Narendra Modi framed the moment as historic. “Welcome to the world’s largest AI Impact Summit. This summit represents India’s one-sixth of humanity,” he said, unveiling MANAV, India’s Human Vision for AI built on moral systems, accountable governance, national sovereignty, accessibility and legitimacy. “The real question is not what artificial intelligence can do in the future. The question is what we choose to do with artificial intelligence.”

Mukesh Ambani echoed the infrastructure urgency, calling compute the biggest constraint in AI today. “With over 500 million subscribers, Jio played a leading role in connecting India through broadband, 4G and 5G. We will now play an even bigger role in connecting India to intelligence,” he said, positioning domestic, green data centres as strategic assets.

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Microsoft President Brad Smith broadened that argument. “AI, perhaps more than any other technology this century, will play a bigger role, either in closing this economic divide or in exacerbating it,” he said, outlining a commitment to spend $50 billion by the end of the decade to bring AI to the Global South, with India among the largest destinations.

The scale of ambition was mirrored globally. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a $15 billion infrastructure investment in India, including a full stack AI hub in Visakhapatnam with gigawatt scale compute and a new international subsea cable gateway. Reflecting on his student days, he said, “Sitting on that train, I never imagined Vizag becoming a global AI hub.” But he added a warning. “We cannot allow the digital divide to become an AI divide.”

Jeet Adani, Director of Adani Digital Labs, sharpened the sovereignty debate. “AI is going to redefine sovereignty,” he said. “Will India import intelligence or architect it? Will we consume productivity or create it?” He argued that energy, compute and services would define India’s AI century. “AI is written in code, but it runs on electricity,” he noted, adding that energy security will be equivalent to intelligence security. Adani referenced a $100 billion commitment toward a sovereign, green energy powered AI infrastructure platform, including a 5 gigawatt integrated ecosystem.

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw underscored the operational strategy behind that vision. “We treat compute as a public good,” he said, announcing access to 38,000 GPUs at affordable rates for startups, researchers and students, with another 20,000 to be added. He stressed that more than 90 percent of use cases can be addressed with smaller, focused models at lower cost, reinforcing a shift toward pragmatic, sector-led AI adoption.

The Workforce Question and the Cognitive Shift

If infrastructure defines sovereignty, labour defines stability. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, delivered one of the summit’s most provocative assessments. “More than 100 million people in India use ChatGPT every week, and more than a third of them are students,” he said, calling India OpenAI’s fastest growing market. But he cautioned that disruption will be profound. “It will be very hard to outwork a GPU in many ways.”

Altman projected that by the end of 2028, more of the world’s intellectual capacity could reside inside data centres than outside them. “We may need superintelligence to help us design the systems that ensure fairness at scale,” he said, urging societies to rethink governance and education.

Read On: By 2028, AI could surpass human intellectual capacity: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, expanded on that theme. AI is nearing what he described as “a country of geniuses in a data center,” systems more capable than most humans at most tasks. Announcing Anthropic’s India expansion and a new Bengaluru office, he said the advances over the past two and a half years have been staggering. Yet he flagged economic displacement as a real risk that must be managed collaboratively.

Sir Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co-Founder of Google DeepMind, called this period “one of the most momentous in human history,” suggesting the impact could be ten times that of the Industrial Revolution at ten times the speed. Artificial general intelligence, he said, may be within five years. But he urged humility and scientific guardrails.

Alexandr Wang, Meta’s Chief AI Officer, highlighted a parallel shift toward personal AI. “Our vision is personal superintelligence,” he said, adding that trust, transparency and governance must move as fast as the models themselves. Roy Jakobs, CEO of Philips, grounded the debate in healthcare. “AI is not about replacing clinicians; it is about giving time back to them,” he said, framing AI as a productivity multiplier rather than a substitute.

India as Both Market and Moral Compass

What sets India apart in this global recalibration is scale. The summit drew leaders from more than 100 countries and an expo turnout of around 2.5 lakh visitors, most under 30. The demographic dividend is becoming an AI dividend.

Read On: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei announces expansion in India

Former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and other global leaders emphasised that balancing innovation with safety will define the decade. The summit’s undertone was clear. Democracies must shape AI norms before norms are shaped elsewhere.

India’s digital public infrastructure, multilingual diversity and massive data generation capacity make it both a laboratory and a market. Vaishnaw’s insistence that ROI will come from the application layer signals a pivot from frontier model fascination to sectoral deployment across healthcare, agriculture, logistics and finance.

The emerging industry trend is clear: AI strategy is converging around four key axes –sovereign compute, green energy, multilingual models, and human-centric governance.

The question is no longer whether India will participate in the AI century, but whether it can translate its demographic advantage and policy intent into lasting technological leadership.

As Pichai noted, “That outcome is neither guaranteed nor automatic.” The summit made one thing clear. The next phase of AI will not be decided only in Silicon Valley. It will be negotiated in New Delhi, Bengaluru and beyond.