Summit Overview

India is hosting a four‑day AI Impact Summit that will be attended by executives from major AI labs and Big Tech, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, as well as heads of state. The event expects 250,000 visitors and will feature Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is scheduled to deliver a speech with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Government Funding and Policy

India has earmarked $1.1 billion for a state‑backed venture capital fund that will invest in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing startups across the country. The tech minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the country wants to attract over $200 billion in investment for AI infrastructure in the next two years. In addition, Indian conglomerate Adani announced an allocation of $100 billion to build AI data centers powered by renewable energy by 2035, which could spur an additional $150 billion in related investments.

Major Corporate Investments

Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity fundraise, with participation from Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners. The company plans to raise another $600 million in debt and deploy more than 20,000 GPUs. Bengaluru‑based C2i, which is building a power solution for data centers, raised $15 million in a Series A round from Peak XV, Yali Deeptech, and TDK Ventures. AMD is teaming up with Tata Consultancy Services to develop rack‑scale AI infrastructure based on AMD’s “Helios” platform.

Startup Activity and Partnerships

Anthropic announced the opening of its first office in Bengaluru and a partnership with Infosys to deploy Claude models and tools to Indian enterprises, beginning with the telecommunications sector. Indian AI company Sarvam introduced smart glasses called Sarvam Kaze and released several new models, including a dubbing model, a speech‑to‑text model, a text‑to‑speech model, and a vision model for OCR. Sarvam also announced partnerships with Qualcomm, HMD, and Bosch to bring its AI models to smartphones, feature phones, cars, laptops, and smart glasses. Voice AI startup Gnani released a zero‑shot voice cloning text‑to‑speech model called Vachana, supporting 12 languages. Cohere Labs launched a family of multilingual models with open weights that support over 70 languages and can run on local devices.

Future Outlook

OpenAI plans to open two new offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai and has partnered with the Tata group to deploy 100 megawatts of compute in India, with an aim to scale up to 1 gigawatt. The Indian government’s AI consortium BharatGen released a 17‑billion‑parameter model called Param 2 that works across 22 languages. Streaming service JioHotstar will use ChatGPT to aid content discovery with conversational search. Industry leaders such as Vinod Khosla warned that AI could dramatically reshape the IT services and BPO sectors within five years, emphasizing the need for Indian talent to focus on AI‑based products and services for global markets.

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