New Delhi is gearing up to become the epicentre of global technological diplomacy as the India AI Impact Summit 2026 kicks off on Monday, February 16, at the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. The five‑day summit is the largest AI event to be held in the Global South, which is the group of developing countries from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The summit will see participation from 15–20 heads of governments, more than 50 ministers, and at least 40 global and Indian CEOs. Among the most notable tech leaders are Sundar Pichai (Google), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), Brad Smith (Microsoft), Yann LeCun (Meta), Cristiano Amon (Qualcomm), and leading Indian industrialists such as Mukesh Ambani and Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron are expected to address sessions on February 19.
For India, this is a strategic positioning exercise to stand apart, not as a participant but as an architect of the global AI future. The country aims to leverage its data scale, digital public infrastructure, and large AI‑ready workforce to influence global AI governance and innovation. The event signals a deliberate shift from “AI action” to “AI impact” for India.
Big Tech views India as a pivotal anchor in its global AI strategy, offering a large and open internet user base which makes it a massive and diverse testbed for AI‑powered products and services. At the same time, it functions as a talent hub, home to one of the largest pools of AI‑skilled engineers and developers—a workforce that global companies rely on for research, product deployment and scaling.
These are complemented by India’s cost‑efficient services backbone, enabling global companies to scale AI deployments more economically. At the same time, India is emerging as an influential regulatory and geopolitical partner as the Global South begins shaping its own AI norms and governance frameworks.
As a case in point, OpenAI has set up a dedicated sales division in India and Anthropic has hired former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose to lead its India operations, signalling that major AI labs are no longer treating India merely as a market but as a strategic base for expansion, experimentation and policy engagement.
A catalyst is the government’s push for public digital infrastructure tailored for AI. The launch of AIKosh, a UPI‑style shared AI platform that offers compute resources, datasets and tools, lowers the barriers for startups and researchers to build and train models—a space previously dominated by Big Tech due to the prohibitive cost of compute.
At the same time, India’s emphasis on sovereign AI, reflected in summit sessions focused on public compute and indigenous AI strategy, signals an intent to reduce dependence on foreign AI architectures and, instead, build national capabilities.
Coupled with this is India’s young, technically skilled engineering base capable of developing foundational models in fields where global systems fall short, from agriculture and public‑health delivery to multilingual computing and financial inclusion.
As Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu told Forbes India during a conversation in December 2025, the deeper challenge is structural. Silicon Valley startups tap a layered, decades‑old talent pipeline. Yahoo drew from Cisco, Google from Yahoo, Facebook from Google, and OpenAI from Google, whereas in India “a new startup cannot assume it will recruit experienced talent ‘from somewhere’, because there is no ‘somewhere’. We have to build that,” Vembu had said.
First Published: Feb 16, 2026, 08:40
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