India AI Impact Summit Draws Global Tech Leaders and Announces Major AI Investments

Overview of the AI Impact Summit

India is hosting a four‑day AI Impact Summit that aims to attract AI investment and showcase the country’s growing role in the global artificial‑intelligence ecosystem. The summit expects 250,000 visitors and includes a roster of senior executives from major AI labs and Big‑Tech firms, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google and Cloudflare. Government leaders are also on the agenda, with India’s prime minister scheduled to deliver a speech alongside the president of France.

Key Government Initiatives

The Indian government announced an allocation of $1.1 billion for a state‑backed venture‑capital fund that will invest in AI and advanced‑manufacturing startups across the country. The tech minister said the nation aims to attract over $200 billion in AI‑infrastructure investment in the next two years.

Major Corporate Announcements

OpenAI’s Sam Altman highlighted that India accounts for more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, making it the second‑largest market after the United States, and that Indian users are the most frequent student users of the platform.

Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity raise, with additional backing from Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset and Nexus Venture Partners. Neysa plans to raise another $600 million in debt and deploy more than 20,000 GPUs.

Bengaluru‑based C2i, which builds power solutions for data centers, secured $15 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures.

AMD announced a partnership with Tata Consultancy Services to develop rack‑scale AI infrastructure based on AMD’s “Helios” platform.

Anthropic opened its first Indian office in Bengaluru and announced a partnership with Infosys to deploy Claude models and tools, beginning with the telecommunications sector and a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence.

OpenAI revealed plans to open two new offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai and partnered with the Tata Group to deploy 100 megawatts of compute in India, with a goal of scaling to 1 gigawatt.

Startup Innovations and Product Launches

Indian AI company Sarvam introduced its smart‑glasses brand “Sarvam Kaze” and released several new models, including dubbing, speech‑to‑text, text‑to‑speech and OCR vision models. Sarvam also announced a partnership with Qualcomm, HMD and Bosch to bring its AI models to a range of devices.

Voice‑AI startup Gnani launched a zero‑shot voice‑cloning text‑to‑speech model called Vachana, supporting 12 languages.

Government‑backed AI consortium BharatGen released a 17‑billion‑parameter model, Param 2, that works across 22 languages.

Infrastructure and Energy Commitments

Conglomerate Adani disclosed a $100 billion plan to build AI data centers powered by renewable energy by 2035, which could trigger an additional $150 billion of investment in server manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure, sovereign cloud platforms and related industries.

UAE’s G42 partnered with U.S. chip maker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of compute in India through a supercomputer project that also involves the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.

Industry Perspectives and Concerns

HCL CEO Vineet Nayyar emphasized that Indian IT companies will focus on profitability rather than job creation, a comment that coincided with a dip in Indian IT stocks amid worries about AI‑driven disruption.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, warned that AI could cause the IT services and BPO sectors to “almost completely disappear” within five years, urging young Indians to sell AI‑based products and services worldwide.

Regulatory and International Collaboration

More than 88 countries and organizations signed the New Delhi AI declaration to promote AI for social and economic good, including the United States, China and Russia. India also joined the Pax Silica group, led by the United States, to create a smooth supply‑chain network for AI‑infrastructure materials.