AI Impact Summit 2026: Highlights So Far, India’s Leverage, and More

The India AI Impact Summit 2026 commenced in New Delhi this week with a significant attendance of global leaders, along with executives from both Indian and international technology firms.

This year’s summit, themed “Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya — Welfare for All, Happiness for All” comes amid exponential growth in AI technology, race to become self-dependent, and conversations around socio-economic impact and data sovereignty, among others. The summit also aspires to put India at the forefront of the AI, currently dominated by the West and China.

Let’s take a look at the top announcements from the ongoing AI Impact Summit 2026 so far:

Boosting computation prowess

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced the addition of more than 20,000 GPUs in addition to the existing 38,000 unit cluster. This is likely to help expand India’s AI coverage as well as take the right step toward reducing computer divide. As we already know, the government is providing these GPUs to startups and researchers at subsidized rates.

The objective is to help provide startups more level playing fields in building AI solutions compared to the ones with deep pockets. Apart from GPUs, the government is also expecting more than USD 200 billion in investment from cloud regions, semiconductors, and manufacturing.

Global Tech Partnerships

One of the highlights of the event has been the global partnership. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a partnership with Reliance Jio to create new cloud clusters and also participate in a 50 MW renewable energy project in Rajasthan to provide power to AI-focused data centres.

Anthropic announced the opening of its office in Bengaluru. The company which makes the popular Claude AI products, says it has also entered into partnerships with brands like Karya and the Collective Intelligence Project to build evaluations testing performance on locally relevant tasks across domains like agriculture and law, in partnership with domain experts from leading Indian nonprofits including Digital Green and Adalat AI.

At the India AI Summit, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has announced a proposed venture under the India AI Mission to build sovereign, scalable GW-scale NVIDIA AI factory infrastructure to reinforce India’s position as a global AI powerhouse.

Separately, NVIDIA announced a partnership with Yotta, which is essentially a hyperscale data center and cloud provider building large‑scale sovereign AI infrastructure for India, branded as Shakti Cloud, powered by over 20,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs.

It also announced that a slew of Indian companies will be using its Nemotron — and NeMo Curator, an open library for multilingual and multimodal data curation. These companies include BharatGen, CoRover.ai, and Gnani.ai among others.

Timing & India’s AI Moat

It is important to see the AI Summit with some context. While the West, with its advancements in LLMs leading to products like ChatGPT and Claude, and China, with contenders such as DeepSeek, have made significant progress, India is lagging in the development of its own comparable models.

And interestingly, India has also been one of the largest consumers of AI as well.

For instance, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman disclosed that ChatGPT has now 100 million weekly active users in India as of February 2026, making the country its second-largest market after the US. Similarly, other genAI products from Google and Perplexity too have found high consumption. And there’s massive deployment of AI by the enterprise space as well.

However, there are not many local names other than the likes of SarvamAI in the space at the moment.

The government, however, is trying to change this with various policies and initiatives, tax holidays, and funds schemes. One of the latest ones is the fund of funds. Recently the Union Cabinet cleared the Startup India Fund of Funds 2.0 (Startup India FoF 2.0) with a total corpus of Rs. 10,000 crore for the purpose of mobilizing venture capital for the startup ecosystem of the country.

According to an official press release, “the Startup India FoF 2.0 follows the strong performance of the Fund of Funds for Startups (FFS 1.0), which was launched in 2016 to address funding gaps and catalyse the domestic venture capital market for startups.

Under FFS 1.0, the entire corpus of Rs. 10,000 crore has been committed to 145 Alternative Investment Funds (AIFs). Such supported AIFs have invested over Rs. 25,500 crore in more than 1,370 startups across the country in sectors such as agriculture, artificial intelligence, robotics, automotive, clean tech, consumer goods & services, e-commerce, education, fintech, food & beverages, healthcare, manufacturing, space tech, and biotechnology amongst others.”

The core issue the FoF is designed to tackle in the Indian AI startup ecosystem is the significant challenge of venture capital. According to an Entrackr data, India had 113 AI startups funded in 2025 with cumulatively raising USD 1313.5 million and accounting for 10.05% of total funding. In comparison, there were 59 startups funded in 2024 with cumulatively raising USD 429.66 million funding and accounting for a mere 2.98% of total funding.

This year, the stats are likely to go even higher. For instance, AI infrastructure platform Neysa has raised USD 1.2 billion aimed at expanding India’s artificial intelligence computing capacity.

Founded in 2023, Neysa provides GPU-based AI infrastructure designed to help enterprises and public institutions train, fine-tune and deploy AI workloads. Its solutions are used across sectors including financial services, technology, healthcare and public services.

Meanwhile, it’s not just the funding but also creating a new economy and jobs. This is where the push to GCC 2.0 comes in. For instance, Anthropic officially opened its first office in Bengaluru today. The company disclosed that India is the second-largest market for Claude.ai, home to a developer community doing some of the most technically intense AI work we see anywhere. Nearly half of Claude usage in India comprises computer and mathematical tasks: building applications, modernizing systems, and shipping production software.

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“India represents one of the world’s most promising opportunities to bring the benefits of responsible AI to vastly more people and enterprises,” said Irina Ghose, Managing Director of India, Anthropic.

“Already, it’s home to extraordinary technical talent, digital infrastructure at scale, and a proven track record of using technology to improve people’s lives. That’s exactly the foundation you need to make sure this technology reaches the people who can benefit from it most.”

“India needs to create a strategic posture of being the AI powerhouse, however there are some critical elements that India yet needs to build at scale. It helps from 2 perspectives: a. While we have application software and services, multilingual models, several initiatives for pushing AI infrastructure, energy and semiconductors, there are some basic capabilities we still need. Therefore, it promotes to build and announce investments in building these critical capabilities which impact AI,” Anushree Verma, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner told Entrepreneur India.

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“b. Sovereignty is being emphasized more than the promotion of global AI standards and regulations during the summit. This indicates a stronger push for local self‑reliance rather than adherence to international frameworks, as reflected in PM Narendra Modi’s tagline – Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya,” Verma added.

Even as India marches ahead in the AI space, there are plenty of challenges. As mentioned earlier, data sovereignty, copyright issues, and requisite infrastructure to woo the global players.

In the Union Budget 2026-27, the government announced a tax holiday till 2047 for eligible foreign cloud service providers operating through India-based data centre infrastructure.

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Earlier at the summit, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said, “The challenges between AI and copyright are very, very complex, and at this summit, we are looking to build some sort of consensus on this. If creators are given the opportunity to deploy their skills, protect their copyrights, and safeguard the roots of their creative energy, then the growth between today and tomorrow will be significant. AI can then be used as a tool.”

Stay tuned for more deep dives on the announcements and coverage on the India AI summit 2026.