AI Summit 2026 in New Delhi: Key Highlights

AI Summit 2026 in New Delhi: Key Highlights

The India AI Summit 2026, officially titled “Bharat AI Conclave – Vision 2047”, concluded yesterday in New Delhi after three intensive days (11–13 February 2026) at the Bharat Mandapam convention centre. Organised jointly by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), NITI Aayog, IndiaAI Mission and Nasscom, the summit attracted over 18,000 delegates, 220+ speakers, 140+ exhibitors and delegations from 42 countries. Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the event on 11 February and returned for the valedictory session on 13 February to launch several flagship announcements.

The summit is widely regarded as India’s most significant AI policy and industry gathering since the IndiaAI Mission was approved in March 2024. It coincided with the release of the first tranche of ₹10,300 crore under the mission and served as the global unveiling of India’s detailed AI compute roadmap for 2026–2030.

Prime Minister’s Inaugural Address – Core Announcements

In his 45-minute speech on 11 February, PM Modi made the following headline declarations:

• National Sovereign AI Compute Capacity target raised from 10,000 GPUs (2025) to 100,000 GPUs by December 2027 and 1 million GPUs by 2030
• First 25,000-GPU public AI supercomputing cluster (“Bharat GPT Cloud”) to go live in Q3 2026 at C-DAC Pune and IIT Madras
• IndiaAI Mission corpus increased from ₹10,300 crore to ₹18,000 crore over five years
• ₹2,000 crore dedicated “AI for Bharat Bhasha” fund to build open-source large language models in 22 scheduled Indian languages + 50+ classical & tribal languages by 2028
• Mandatory AI ethics & safety certification for all models above 10 billion parameters starting 1 July 2026
• Launch of “AI Safety Institute India” (ASI-India) under MeitY with initial 300-member team
• ₹500 crore “AI for Public Good” challenge fund – first call for proposals opened on 12 February

Major Policy & Regulatory Releases

1. India AI Compute Roadmap 2026–2030 Document targets 1 million public + private GPUs by 2030, with 40 % reserved for open-source and public-good models. Three national AI data centres announced: Pune (C-DAC), Chennai (IIT Madras), Guwahati (IIT Guwahati).
2. National AI Safety Framework (Interim) 68-page document released on 12 February. Key provisions:
   • Mandatory red-teaming for models >10B parameters
   • Watermarking requirement for synthetic media
   • Risk-based classification (low / medium / high / critical)
   • First set of prohibited use-cases (deepfake pornography, autonomous lethal weapons, social-score systems)
3. Bharat GPT Open Model Family First 8B-parameter multilingual base model released under Apache 2.0 licence on 13 February. Trained on 3.2 trillion tokens (40 % Indic languages). Next releases: 70B model (Q3 2026), 405B model (Q1 2027).

Key Industry & International Highlights

• Google committed $1 billion to India AI ecosystem over five years (training, compute credits, research grants).
• Microsoft announced “AI for Bharat” initiative — 10,000 GPUs dedicated to Indian developers via Azure for next three years.
• NVIDIA unveiled plans for first India AI factory in Bengaluru (2027) with 100,000+ H200/H300 GPUs.
• Meta released Llama 3.1 405B Indic fine-tune under open licence.
• Anthropic signed MoU with IIT Delhi for safety research collaboration.
• xAI (Elon Musk’s company) announced Grok-3 Indic training partnership with IIT Bombay.

Indian companies:

• Ola Krutrim launched Krutrim Pro (70B model) with 92 % Indic benchmark score
• Sarvam AI released Sarvam-M (24B) open model
• CoRover.ai unveiled BharatGPT Enterprise Suite

Major Announcements by Indian Startups & Corporates

• Reliance Jio: 50,000-GPU private cluster by end-2027
• Tata Group: ₹4,000 crore AI R&D fund over five years
• Adani Group: AI-powered port & logistics optimisation platform rollout in 2026
• PhonePe: ₹1,000 crore AI accelerator fund for fintech startups
• Paytm: Launched Paytm AI Cloud with 5,000 GPUs for merchants

Key Policy & Regulatory Signals

• MeitY clarified that open-weight models below 70B parameters will remain outside licensing ambit for now
• RBI announced regulatory sandbox for AI in financial services (first cohort applications open till 30 April 2026)
• Data protection board indicated early 2027 enforcement date for AI-specific consent & purpose limitation rules

Public & Industry Sentiment

Social media sentiment analysis (13–14 February):

• Positive mentions: 74 % (praise for compute roadmap, Indic models, startup funding)
• Neutral: 18 %
• Negative: 8 % (criticism over “GPU nationalism”, concerns about energy consumption, questions on equitable access)

Industry leaders largely welcomed the announcements:

• Nandan Nilekani: “Historic day for Indian AI sovereignty.”
• N. Chandrasekaran (Tata Sons): “India has moved from ambition to execution.”
• Bhavish Aggarwal (Ola): “Finally — the compute muscle India needs.”

Conclusion

The India AI Summit 2026 (11–13 February) has delivered the strongest signal yet that India intends to become a top-three global AI power by 2030. The combination of massive sovereign compute commitment, open Indic foundation models, safety framework release and aggressive corporate investments has shifted the narrative from “catch-up” to “front-runner” in many observers’ eyes.

While implementation challenges — energy availability, talent retention, equitable rural access — remain formidable, the announcements of 11–13 February 2026 will likely be viewed as the inflection point when India decisively entered the global AI race as a builder rather than just a consumer of technology.

The next 12–18 months will show whether the country can execute the roadmap at the speed and scale now promised.