In India, India Prime Minister Narendra Modi proposed India as the world largest artificial intelligence center in his keynote address at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi. To kick off the event on February 19 in Bharat Mandapam he urged world leaders to unite in inclusive AI governance with India as a source of talent pool and an innovation engine.

Summit Launch Highlights

The leaders of world leaders like the French president Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Lula da Silva and the tech leaders like Jensen Huang, the Nvidia CEO and Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO were among those who attended the event. It involved over 100 countries where 13 countries had pavilion displaying AI solutions and 600 Indian start-ups.

Modi emphasized that India is shifting to a producer of AI, and the IndiaAI Mission can help the nation to achieve this goal by investing up to 1.25 billion in it. In his announcement he said that India has the largest talent pool 3 million AI experts by 2026 and the largest data set to experiment with actual uses in a global south imperative with the necessity to democratize access in order to close the digital divide.

​The number of working groups was seven and touched such themes as economic growth, social good, safe AI, human capital, resource equity, and innovation. Leaders desired results to be a declaration of inclusive and ethical systems.

​India’s AI Ambitions

Modi also proclaimed the 10,000 GPU clusters as a result of the program of public-private cooperation, and it is directed to such areas as healthcare, agriculture, and government. One of them would be AI-farmers, which predict crops by 20 percent and 1.4 billion vernacular language model users.

He put India as the enemy of the US-China domination, and he defended AI in support of individuals who believe in monopolies. Startups that Modi noted include Sarvam AI and Krutrim and said that India is scalable because UPI can transform finance or CoWIN can save lives.

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Such ethical guardrails as data sovereignty, bias mitigation, and job-reskilling 100 million workers were highlighted by the PM. Microsoft and Qualcomm will implement AI with the help of Google in rural schools and hospitals.

​Global Echoes

The western leaders praised India. Macron applauded collaborative possibility; Lula ensured AI was climate resilient. Investment by tech executives- Nvidia said it would provide access to chips, OpenAI eye native models.

This hosted event in the Global South displaced the safety theme and brought an emphasis on effect, such as the Bletchley, Seoul, and Paris summits. The presence of US and China was the diplomatic win that was witnessed by the IT Secretary S Krishnan.

​Strategic Edge

The software leadership of the US and the hardware leadership of China is undermined by the Indian scale of developers (3rd in the world, following US and China) as envisaged by Modi. NITI Aayog estimates that AI can add the amount of $500 billion to the GDP by 2030.

Opponents are issuing infrastructure red flags, and the wind of change at the peak 50+ CEOs assured them: buy-in is under way, there has to be an AI, the one that empowers all Indians, all villages Viksit Bharat at the forefront.

As the number of additional sessions continues until February 20, deals are accelerating India to hub despite high competition in the global arena.