Overview

Last week, New Delhi hosted the India AI Impact Summit 2026, a five-day global convening on AI that drew unprecedented international participation from stakeholders across the board including governments, multilateral organizations, and members from the civil society and industry. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi formally inaugurated the Summit on February 19, marking it as the fourth in a series of global AI summits — following Bletchley Park (2023), Seoul (2024), and Paris (2025) —and notably the first such Summit hosted in the Global South.

The Summit brought together over 20 heads of state, 60 ministers, and over 500 global AI leaders, alongside industry CEO/CXOs, experts, and an enthusiastic public turnout that ultimately exceeded 500,000 attendees across five days. Overall, it  served to showcase India’s rise and role as a important actor in global technology and AI governance. India’s approach – prioritizing innovation, development, and inclusion over prescriptive regulation – resonated with global stakeholders and achieved broad consensus on global AI norms. In fact, the Summit’s final declaration garnered 89 signatories, exceeding the 60 endorsements of the 2025 Paris AI Summit, reinforcing India’s ambition to serve as a bridge between advanced AI economies and the Global South.

Highlights

The New Delhi Declaration on AI

Unveiled a day after the Summit concluded, the Declaration won broad support from 89 countries and international organizations, including the United States, China and European Union, marking a rare global consensus on AI governance. Structured around seven thematic pillars and associated working‑group outcomes, the Declaration emphasized practical cooperation and voluntary frameworks rather than binding regulation. By favoring non-binding frameworks over prescriptive rules, the New Delhi Declaration lowered barriers for diverse nations to participate in shaping AI norms. Key deliverables included:

• A Charter for the Democratic Diffusion of AI, committing nations to expand affordable access to foundational AI resources and spur local innovation.
• A Global AI Impact Commons to share and enable replication of successful AI use-cases for social and economic good.
• A Trusted AI Commons will pool technical tools, benchmarks and best practices for secure, and reliable AI systems and to foster safe innovation.
• An International Network of AI for Science Institutions to connect research bodies worldwide to share AI expertise for scientific advancement.
• An AI for Social Empowerment Platform will facilitate knowledge exchange and scalable solutions, boosting equitable AI adoption in areas like education, health and agriculture.
• Additional initiatives included voluntary AI skilling principles, an AI Workforce Development Playbook, and guiding principles for resilient and energy‑efficient AI infrastructure.

New Delhi Frontier Commitments on AI

On 19 February, leading frontier AI firms, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Cohere, Sarvam AI, BharatGen, Gnani AI, and Soket, announced a set of “Frontier AI Impact Commitments” to improve how AI’s real-world economic use is measured and how AI systems are evaluated across languages and cultural contexts. Announced as a key outcome of the Summit by Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Ashwini Vaishnaw, the commitments signal a push toward greater transparency, inclusivity, and evidence-based policymaking as AI adoption accelerates globally.

Participating firms endorsed a voluntary set of pledges focusing on two core areas: (1) advancing the analysis of real-world AI usage by developing richer measures of AI diffusion across the global economy and publishing anonymized, aggregated insights on adoption by the next AI Summit; (2) strengthening multilingual and use-case evaluations by improving how AI systems are assessed across different languages, cultures, and local contexts. Progress on these commitments is expected to be reported through established transparency mechanisms, such as the Hiroshima AI Process Reporting Framework.

Bilateral and Multilateral Engagements

The India AI Impact Summit also doubled as a high-profile venue for diplomacy, catalyzing significant bilateral and multilateral engagements:

• Pax Silica Initiative: On February 20, India formally joined the U.S.-led Pax Silica alliance, with IT Minister Vaishnaw signing a declaration alongside U.S. Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg, U.S. Ambassador to India Sergio Gor and India’s IT Secretary S. Krishnan. Pax Silica is a nine-nation supply chain alliance spanning critical minerals, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, and AI infrastructure. It aims to reduce dependence on Chinese supply chains and to anchor AI and semiconductor ecosystems within trusted governance frameworks. Complementing the initiative, the U.S. State Department launched a USD 200 million Edge AI Package to deploy secure, affordable smartphones across the Indo-Pacific. India’s inclusion signals a shift in U.S. assessment, from downstream market to system-level contributor, though India’s posture is better read as hedging than decoupling, given parallel bilateral mineral deals with Argentina, Chile, and Zambia that sit outside the Pax Silica framework.
• U.S.–India AI Opportunity Partnership: The United States delegation led by Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy articulated its vision for empowering global allies with cutting edge, sovereign AI technologies with its recent American AI Exports Program. Kratsios focused his address on America’s AI leadership, the rejection of global governance for the pursuit of real AI sovereignty, and the opportunity for U.S. partners and allies to build the AI future for their peoples with components of the American AI stack.  The two sides also announced an addendum to the Pax Silica announcement with the ‘U.S.-India AI Opportunity Partnership’. The three key focus areas of this addendum that builds on the TRUST and COMPACT framework are:
• Pro-Innovation Regulation – Both sides pledged regulatory regimes that prioritize growth over restriction and empowering builders, startups to platforms to deploy and scale AI systems.
• Strengthening the AI Stack– Exploring joint initiatives including research and development projects to expand reliable energy infrastructure, produce critical minerals, harness skilled workforces, and accelerate the development of trusted semiconductor ecosystems.
• Driving Free Enterprise – Both sides seek to foster an environment that unlocks cross-border venture capital flows, R&D partnerships, next-generation data centers, joint compute/processor access, and AI model and applications development, with the private sector explicitly positioned as the engine.

The U.S. chose the India AI summit to unveil these programs – aimed at reinforcing U.S. technology leadership while supporting global needs – underscoring the importance of India as a strategic partner.

• Meanwhile, numerous U.S. technology CEOs (from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, etc.) held discussions with Indian leaders including Prime Minister Modi both bilaterally and participated in the CEOs Roundtable chaired by the Prime Minister on February 19. These dialogues focused on scaling up AI investment, joint R&D, and securing supply chains, reinforcing the momentum of U.S.-India commercial and strategic collaboration in tech.
• India’s Global Outreach: India engaged a wide array of international partners during the Summit. Prime Minister Modi held at least seven bilateral meetings with foreign heads of state and governments (including leaders of Bhutan, Spain, Croatia, Greece, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, and others), using the opportunity to strengthen ties and explore cooperation in AI and digital initiatives. Dozens of other high-level interactions took place: for example, India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal met with the President of Switzerland to discuss collaboration, coinciding with Switzerland’s announcement to host the next global AI Summit in Geneva in 2027. There was also engagement with leaders from the Gulf states and Africa – e.g. the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, and delegations from countries like Serbia, Finland, Estonia, Guyana, and more – reflecting India’s active outreach across regions.
• Multilateral Cooperation: The Summit facilitated new multi-country collaborations on AI. The Summit also hosted a Ministerial Council meeting of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) with representatives from 44 countries (co-chaired by South Korea and Singapore), renewing commitment to OECD-based principles for responsible AI use. The International Solar Alliance (ISA) launched a Global Mission on AI for Energy at the Summit, aiming to accelerate AI adoption in clean energy systems across its member countries. In his opening remarks, UN Secretary General António Guterres called for ‘A Global Fund on AI’ with a target of USD three billion. 15 leading research institutions from India, Africa, Latin America, and beyond launched the “Global South Network for Trustworthy AI” to drive AI safety research and capacity building tailored to the developing world. These multilateral efforts indicate that India is leveraging its platform to amplify Global South perspectives in AI governance and to institutionalize cooperation on AI ethics, standards, and research.

Sovereign AI and Digital Public Infrastructure

Indian AI firms unveiled new large language models (LLMs) optimized for local needs: Bengaluru’s Sarvam AI introduced two LLMs (including a 105-billion-parameter model supporting complex reasoning and 22 Indian languages) and Gnani.ai launched a new speech recognition model as part of its sovereign voice AI platform. The government previewed “AI Mission 2.0”, targeting increased R&D funding, widespread AI adoption by small businesses, and a rapid scale-up of computing capacity (including the purchase of 20,000 new high-end GPUs to double national AI compute within six months)

In parallel, India showcased the maturation of its digital public infrastructure: the NPCI launched “UPI One World” – a mobile wallet enabling international visitors to make instant payments in India without local bank accounts (via internationally-funded prepaid UPI wallets) – showcasing India’s fintech leadership and openness to foreign users. In healthcare, the SAHI (Strategy for AI in Healthcare) and BODH (Benchmarking Open Data Platform for Health) initiatives were launched as “digital public goods” to spur AI adoption and trust in the health sector, by providing national frameworks and privacy-preserving platforms for AI model validation on health data. Additionally, the government released six sectoral AI case study compendiums (covering health, energy, education, agriculture, gender, and accessibility) with 170 proven AI use-cases, signalling priority areas for future public-sector procurements, pilot programs, and public–private partnerships.

Taken together, these announcements underscore the strategic logic behind India’s sovereign AI and DPI integration push. By coupling locally anchored models with state‑supported compute expansion, shared data frameworks, and clear public‑procurement signals, India is actively de‑risking reliance on foreign AI stacks while steering adoption toward linguistic inclusion, privacy preservation, and cost‑effective scale. The DPI layer operationalizes this approach at population level—demonstrated through exportable payments infrastructure, trust‑building health data platforms, and procurement‑ready use‑case pipelines—positioning India not merely as a large AI consumer market, but as an emerging rule‑setter advancing an alternative, state‑enabled model of AI development for the Global South.

Implications for Business

• A Rapidly Expanding Market with Strong State Backing: India is staking out AI and digital tech as a pillar of its development strategy, which means substantial public investment and policy support for tech infrastructure. The Summit saw Indian officials confirm huge commitments exceeding USD 250 billion. For technology firms, this translates to a robust and growing market for AI solutions, cloud and semiconductor hardware, and advanced digital services.
• Local Partnerships as a Strategic Imperative: A recurring theme of the Summit was “building in India, for India and for the world.” Many of the largest announcements involved collaborations between U.S. tech firms and Indian conglomerates or government agencies. For multinational companies, pursuing local partnerships are crucial to align with India’s policy direction, helping companies navigate regulations around data sovereignty and building goodwill by supporting India’s self-reliance goals.
• Alignment with Strategic Sectors & Public Priorities: Companies can maximize their impact in India by aligning their strategies with the priority sectors and policy objectives identified by the Indian government. Official case studies highlight significant AI opportunities in healthcare, energy, education, agriculture, gender empowerment, and accessibility—areas poised to benefit from supportive policies and public funding. Firms offering AI solutions in these domains are likely to find a receptive environment for pilot initiatives and public-private partnerships. Moreover, India’s emphasis on digital public goods and open platforms underscores the importance of interoperability and societal benefit as key differentiators. Companies that design inclusive products—supporting Indian languages, affordability, and accessibility—and collaborate with Indian authorities on safety, ethics, and cultural relevance standards are more likely to gain regulatory traction and public trust.

Key Commercial Outcomes