By Aman
“A nation’s ambition is best measured not in the grandeur of the stages it builds — but in the honesty of the conversations it dares to have upon them.”
I walked out of Bharat Mandapam on the final day of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 carrying two things: a deep sense of national pride and an equally deep sense of unease. Both feelings are legitimate. Both must be spoken. Because if India is truly to lead in the age of artificial intelligence, it cannot afford the comfort of selective memory — celebrating what shone, while quietly sweeping the uncomfortable truths beneath the carpets of press releases and investment pledges.
This article is not a celebration. Nor is it a takedown. It is a dissection the kind that a physician performs not out of cruelty, but out of care. Because India, in this week of February 2026, did something extraordinary. It hosted the world’s largest AI summit. It drew 500,000 visitors, 20+ heads of state, and the CEOs of every major AI company on the planet. It secured investment pledges that could reshape the country’s technological future. And then — almost as if on cue — it also stumbled, stumbled in ways that the entire world watched, recorded, and dissected on its behalf.
Both things are India. And both things are worth understanding.
I. The Stage Was Genuinely Historic — And That Must Be Said
First before we examine the fractures, intellectual honesty demands that we first acknowledge the foundation. The India AI Impact Summit 2026 was, by any serious measure, an unprecedented gathering. It was the fourth in a global series of AI summits following Bletchley Park in the United Kingdom in 2023, Seoul in 2024, and Paris in 2025 — and it was the first to be hosted in the Global South. That is not a footnote. That is a civilizational statement.
For decades, the frameworks, the norms, the governance architectures of every major emerging technology have been designed in the corridors of Washington, Brussels, and Beijing. The Global South has typically shown up after the blueprint was already drawn as consumers, as data points, as markets. New Delhi, in choosing to host this summit, was making an argument that the 1.4 billion people of this country, and the billions more across the developing world, are not passengers in this technological revolution.
They are — or they intend to become — co-pilots.
PM Narendra Modi, whatever one’s political views, understood the symbolic weight of the moment. When he stood at the inaugural ceremony and declared that India’s approach to AI would be guided by “Welfare for all, Happiness of all,” he was doing something philosophically interesting. He was reframing the entire vocabulary of the global AI conversation — away from existential risk narratives that animate Silicon Valley and Whitehall, and toward a development-first, inclusion-first paradigm that resonates in villages across Kerala, Odisha, and Rajasthan.
“For India, AI stands for All Inclusive.” — That is not just a tagline. It is a civilisational argument.
The numbers underlined this ambition strikingly. More than 500,000 people attended the summit across its six days — a number that dwarfed every previous AI summit combined. The total attendees at the entire Paris AI Summit last year were fewer than the crowd that showed up for just the Sarvam AI product launch in New Delhi. Five hundred side events ran simultaneously. Five hundred and fifty pre-summit events had already taken place across 30 countries before the first delegate arrived at Bharat Mandapam. This was not a conference. It was a movement.
And the investment commitments? They were staggering on paper. Reliance pledged approximately $110 billion into data centers and AI infrastructure. Adani committed $100 billion to AI-powered data centers run on renewable energy by 2035, with an additional $150 billion in supporting infrastructure. Microsoft confirmed it was on track to invest $50 billion in the Global South by the end of the decade. OpenAI signed a landmark partnership with the Tata Group for 100 megawatts of AI compute, with ambitions to scale to 1 gigawatt.
Blackstone participated in a $600 million equity raise for Indian AI infrastructure company Neysa. Anthropic opened its first Indian office in Bengaluru, having already declared India as its second-largest market for Claude globally. The government announced an $1.1 billion state-backed venture capital fund for AI and advanced manufacturing.
By any conventional measure of a summit’s success, these are extraordinary outcomes. India’s Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw articulated a target of attracting $200 billion in AI infrastructure investment within two years. Even half that number, delivered with execution discipline, could fundamentally alter the technological landscape of this country.
II. The Energy in the Room — And What It Revealed
I want to speak now from personal observation, because data alone does not capture what this summit felt like from the inside.
The energy at Bharat Mandapam was unlike anything I have experienced at a technology event in this country. There was something genuinely electric about watching thousands of young Indians — engineers, students, startup founders, farmers’ sons and daughters who had taken a bus from three states away — walking through exhibition halls displaying AI applications for agriculture, healthcare, vernacular language processing, and financial inclusion.
For many of them, this was the first time artificial intelligence had stopped being an abstract Silicon Valley concept and become something tangible, something touchable, something that might actually change their lives.
The exhibitor diversity was remarkable. More than 300 exhibitors from 30 countries showcased solutions across 10 thematic pavilions — agriculture, security, fintech, education, healthcare, manufacturing, governance. From AI models diagnosing crop disease in real-time, to multilingual chatbots helping rural women access government schemes, to smart grid optimization tools for overstretched power utilities — the breadth of application was genuinely impressive and genuinely Indian in its pragmatic focus.
“India does not have the luxury of AI as a philosophical exercise. It needs AI as a plumber needs a wrench — to fix things that are broken, at scale, immediately.”
But here is where I must be honest about something that bothered me deeply, even as I marvelled at the scale and the sincerity. Walk through those exhibition halls with careful eyes, and a pattern emerges that is impossible to ignore. The same problem stated slightly differently, packaged slightly differently, but fundamentally the same kept appearing booth after booth. Everyone was solving for the visible, for the immediately fundable, for the already validated.
Nobody was solving for the impossible.
India’s AI story if it is to be a story that the world remembers cannot be built on a thousand parallel solutions to the same problem. The country’s greatest competitive advantage in AI is not its talent base, though that is substantial. It is not its data volumes, though those are unprecedented. It is the sheer complexity and diversity of its problems problems so uniquely Indian, so deeply multi-lingual, so structurally different from anything that exists in the United States or China, that only Indian minds, with Indian context and Indian lived experience, can solve them elegantly. And that moonshot thinking, that willingness to go where nobody has gone was conspicuously absent from the rooms I walked through.
The summit made India a cynosure for global AI. The question that haunts me is: will the government’s backing match the ambition that was on display? Intent was abundant. Infrastructure commitments were loud. But the systemic barriers bureaucratic friction, regulatory opacity, that still unsolved challenge of making India genuinely easy to do business is remained largely unaddressed in the conversations I heard. Speeches are not policies. Pledges are not capital deployed. And a Guinness World Record for AI responsibility pledges, while charming, is not the same as binding governance.
III. The Drama
No honest account of this summit can avoid the incidents that the world’s media seized upon with varying degrees of fairness and unfairness. Let us address them directly, philosophically, and without either defensive nationalism or performative self- flagellation.
The Galgotias University incident was, in its essence, a moment of profound institutional immaturity meeting a stage of global consequence. A representative of the university stood before cameras and claimed, on the record on national television, that a robot dog developed by China’s Unitree Robotics was an indigenous innovation of their Centre of Excellence. The robot the Unitree Go2, a commercially available product widely available online was identified within hours by sharp-eyed social media users.
The university’s stall was shut down. Power was cut to the pavilion. An apology was issued that managed simultaneously to blame the ill-informed representative and deny that any claim was ever made a feat of institutional logic that would be impressive if it were not so embarrassing.
The Associated Press reported that two Indian government officials called it an “embarrassment for host country India.” China’s Global Times Beijing’s state media mouthpiece ran the story with barely concealed delight, calling it an international embarrassment and noting that Indian netizens were now investigating whether other
products on display had similarly ambiguous origins. India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi called the summit a “disorganized PR spectacle.”
But here is the philosophical point worth sitting with. The Galgotias incident was not an anomaly. It was a symptom. It was the symptom of a culture present in academic institutions, in corporate corridors, and yes, in government that confuses the appearance of innovation with innovation itself. That conflates proximity to cutting edge technology with the creation of cutting-edge technology. India cannot afford this confusion. Not now. Not on a stage this visible.
Not when the entire world is watching to determine whether this country’s AI ambitions are substantive or theatrical.
The Bill Gates withdrawal added another layer of turbulence. Gates, named in the Epstein files and facing renewed public scrutiny over his past associations with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, cancelled his keynote speech just hours before he was scheduled to take the stage. The Gates Foundation cited a desire to “ensure focus remains on the AI Summit’s key priorities.” Al Jazeera, with characteristic directness, reported that the Epstein shadow had followed Gates to New Delhi. The timing was, to use the charitable word, unfortunate. To use the honest word: catastrophic for optics.
Then there was the organizational chaos that greeted the summit’s opening days. Overcrowding, Conflicting security instructions. Delegates left without food or water during the security lockdown ahead of the Prime Minister’s visit. A Bengaluru entrepreneur publicly alleged that his products for which he had paid went missing inside the high-security zone. Bloomberg reported that delegates were stranded during PM Modi’s inauguration visit. The IT Minister publicly apologized for the “problems” on day one.
CNBC’s correspondent on the ground called it one of the most challenging reporting assignments of his career. Traffic, he wrote, “didn’t move at all” on several days.
Entering the venue on inauguration day required navigating security that gave conflicting instructions at every checkpoint.
None of this is disqualifying. Every large-scale event has organizational challenges. The Paris summit had its own political tensions. Bletchley Park had its own access issues.
But there is a difference between logistical teething trouble and the kind of systemic disorganization that signals deeper structural problems. India’s government has organized events of enormous complexity before the G20 summit in New Delhi in 2023 was, by most accounts, superbly managed. The AI Summit’s organizational stumbles cannot simply be attributed to scale. They point, instead, to a planning culture that perhaps prioritized the headline numbers over the ground level execution quality.
IV. The Geopolitical Theatre And Why It Matters More Than the
Investment Numbers To understand what the India AI Impact Summit 2026 truly was, you have to understand what it was not trying to be. It was not trying to be the Bletchley Park summit, with its gravity-soaked focus on existential AI risk. It was not trying to be the Seoul summit, with its emphasis on safety commitments from frontier AI labs. And it was explicitly, deliberately not trying to be the Paris summit which, from India’s vantage point, represented a gathering of the already powerful, making rules for everyone else.
India’s framing People, Planet, Progress, anchored in the three Sutras and organized through seven thematic Chakras was a conscious philosophical reorientation of the entire AI governance conversation. Where Bletchley Park asked “how do we prevent AI from destroying us,” and Paris asked “how do we govern AI responsibly,” New Delhi asked a different question entirely: “how do we ensure that AI serves the people who have never been served before?”
This shift matters enormously. And it was recognized. Jakob Mökander, director at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, put it plainly: India is right now the player that most confidently rejects the US-China binary. That is not a small thing. In a world where two countries control approximately 85% of all global AI computing power, having the world’s most populous democracy stand up and say “we reject this dynamic” is a geopolitical act of real consequence.
But the geopolitics also revealed its own complications. The United States arrived at the summit not in a spirit of multilateral cooperation, but in the spirit of strategic competition. White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios was direct: “America is the only AI superpower willing and able to truly empower partner nations in your pursuit of meaningful AI sovereignty.” He explicitly rejected global AI governance: “We totally reject global governance of AI.” American AI firms, meanwhile, were not shy about their own agenda positioning the American AI stack as the infrastructure upon which India and other nations should build their AI futures.
“Real AI sovereignty means owning and using best- in-class technology for your people,” said the White House which is one way of saying: build your house, but buy our bricks.”
India’s own senior AI advisor Sriram Krishnan, representing the US perspective at the summit, drew backlash with comments suggesting that the American AI stack should be the “bedrock” its allies build upon. Critics including many Indian AI researchers and entrepreneurs pointed out the contradiction at the heart of this: a summit built on the idea of AI sovereignty was, structurally, at risk of merely replicating the dependency it claimed to transcend, only with American technology instead of Chinese.
China, for its part, showed up in a muted but deliberate way. A senior Chinese delegation attended led by notable AI research figures including the presidents of the Shanghai AI Research Institute and Beijing Institute of Technology and expressed support for India’s multilateral framework proposals, particularly around Global South initiatives. But China’s main-stage absence was hard to miss. Beijing was, by and large, watching from the sidelines, taking notes, and letting the Galgotias incident do its media work for free.
The deeper geopolitical undercurrent that TIME Magazine captured with rare clarity was the growing anxiety of what it called “middle powers” India, Canada, much of Europe who found themselves rattled by Trump’s America. After threats to take Greenland, public questioning of NATO’s value, and tariff warfare that left few allies unscathed, the summit’s subtext was as much about where countries like India stood in a fracturing world order as it was about large language models and GPU counts.
V. What the World’s Media Said — And What It Missed
The global media coverage of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 was, predictably, a Rorschach test. What you saw in the coverage depended enormously on what lens you brought to it.
American media NBC, CNBC, Foreign Policy broadly read the summit through the lens of US strategic interest. India was a valued partner, a market of extraordinary scale, a China-alternative for AI infrastructure investment. The chaos was noted but contextualized. The investment numbers were celebrated. The geopolitical alignment with the US was emphasized. What American coverage largely missed was the legitimate question of whether US tech companies, armed with $700 billion in combined capex commitments for 2026 alone, are genuinely empowering Indian AI sovereignty or simply ensuring that India becomes their most valuable customer.
British coverage, led by BBC News, fixated on the organizational chaos. The opening-day disorder made for compelling reporting, and the BBC’s framing India’s ambitious summit “overshadowed” by mismanagement was technically accurate but narratively incomplete. Chatham House’s more measured observation, that global AI governance consensus is “a far cry from reality,” came closer to the real intellectual challenge the summit raised.
China’s Global Times played its role with practiced efficiency amplifying the Galgotias incident, noting the “embarrassment” with barely suppressed glee, while simultaneously publishing analyses that acknowledged India’s genuine momentum in the global AI race. This dual posture publicly gleeful about India’s stumbles, privately respectful of India’s trajectory is characteristic of how Beijing processes the rise of a country it views as both rival and potential partner.
Al Jazeera provided perhaps the most globally-grounded coverage, reporting not only on the Gates-Epstein controversy but consistently foregrounding the voice of the UN Secretary-General, who warned against leaving AI’s future to the “whims of a few billionaires.” That warning delivered from the stage of a summit co-hosted by some of the world’s most powerful billionaires had an irony that was not lost on attentive observers.
Civil society Amnesty International, the Internet Freedom Foundation, TechPolicy.Press was the sharpest and most substantive critic. Amnesty International declared that the summit failed to secure concrete commitments to halt “destructive practices” by governments and technology companies, specifically calling out AI deployment in predictive policing, biometric surveillance, and automated welfare systems. TechPolicy.Press argued with considerable analytical force that the summit’s structure giving multinational corporations the same level access as sovereign governments in the CEO Roundtable and Leaders’ Plenary, while civil society, labour leaders, and human rights defenders had no equivalent high-level platform was a structural statement about whose voices matter in shaping the future of AI.
This criticism deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed as ideological. The uncomfortable reality is that India’s AI governance framework, like France’s before it, treated the summit primarily as a trade and investment event. The Delhi Declaration signed by over 70 nations contained aspirational language about AI’s benefits being “shared by humanity,” but contained no binding enforcement mechanism, no accountability structure, and no explicit prohibition on the most clearly harmful AI applications that are already being deployed by governments around the world, including India’s own.
VI. The Indian AI Ecosystem :Where It Genuinely Shines
It would be both unfair and inaccurate to leave the summit’s substantive technological achievements unrecognised. Beneath the investment pledges and geopolitical maneuvering, there was genuine indigenous innovation on display.
Sarvam AI — an Indian AI laboratory that embodies the kind of sovereign, India-first AI development the government’s rhetoric calls for had what may have been the summit’s single most significant technical moment. It launched not one but two major open- source large language models: Sarvam 30B and Sarvam 105B, both built on a mixture- of-experts architecture. It simultaneously announced partnerships with Qualcomm, HMD, and Bosch to deploy its models across smartphones, feature phones, vehicles, laptops, and smart glasses — building an indigenous AI model directly into the hardware layer of everyday Indian life. PM Modi tested the Sarvam Kaze smart glasses himself at the Expo. This is not theater. This is real.
The government-backed BharatGen Param2 — a 17-billion parameter model supporting all 22 scheduled Indian languages with multimodal capabilities represents genuine progress toward the kind of linguistically sovereign AI that India’s extraordinary linguistic diversity demands. Gnani’s Vachana model, offering zero-shot voice cloning in 12 Indian languages, addresses a problem of real practical importance in a country where hundreds of millions of people access information primarily through voice.
Emergent, an Indian AI startup, reported reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue just eight months after launch one of the fastest ARR trajectories in the history of Indian enterprise software. And Sam Altman, speaking at the summit, confirmed that India now accounts for over 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users second only to the United States. That is not a vanity metric. That is a signal of genuine, large-scale AI adoption at the consumer level.
The government’s own compute expansion plans adding 20,000 GPUs to an existing base of 38,000 under the IndiaAI Compute Portal and the framing of India’s AI strategy as “frugal, sovereign, and scalable” reflect a mature understanding that India cannot simply replicate the American or Chinese model. It must build its own.
VII. The Questions That Were Not Asked — And Must Be
Every summit is defined as much by what it refuses to discuss as by what it celebrates. And there are several conversations the India AI Impact Summit 2026 conspicuously avoided.
Nobody spoke seriously about jobs. Not the comfortable, aspirational “AI will create new jobs” narrative but the hard, uncomfortable question of what happens to India’s 5 million IT services employees and the millions more in BPOs when the technology those industries sell is automated by the very tools being celebrated in the halls of Bharat Mandapam. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said from the summit stage that IT services and BPOs “can almost completely disappear” within five years because of AI. India’s HCL CEO said Indian IT companies would focus on “turning profits and not being job creators.” These are statements of extraordinary consequence for a country where a vast middle class was built on exactly those industries.
“India invited the world to celebrate AI’s potential for inclusion. It forgot to invite the conversation about AI’s potential for exclusion — of its own workforce.”
Nobody spoke seriously about the surveillance state. The irony of a government that, just one week before the summit, had tightened social media content-takedown rules to require removal of flagged content within three hours hosting a summit themed around AI safety, human rights, and democratic values was noted by civil society observers but absent from official discourse. The Internet Freedom Foundation and Amnesty International were right to raise this. A government cannot credibly position itself as a global champion of responsible AI while simultaneously deploying AI-enabled surveillance infrastructure domestically without public accountability frameworks.
Nobody spoke seriously about the innovator gap. India has extraordinary engineering talent and extraordinary consumer scale. What it lacks still is the culture and infrastructure of deep, patient, original research. The country that hosted this summit still sends its best AI researchers to do their foundational work at MIT, Stanford, and DeepMind. Building that domestic research culture requires not just compute infrastructure and VC capital, but a fundamental shift in how Indian institutions value and reward original thinking over credential accumulation. The Galgotias incident was, in miniature, a symptom of this very disease.
And nobody at the official level spoke about the possibility that the $200 billion investment target, the pledge commitments, the Guinness World Records, and the photo opportunities with tech CEOs might be exactly the kind of “headline-grabbing sops” that GAVEKAL analyst Udith Sikand warned about impressive in announcement, insufficient in execution, unless matched by the grinding, unglamorous work of structural reform.
VIII. The Verdict — Complicated, As India Always Is
So what, finally, was the India AI Impact Summit 2026?
It was the largest AI gathering in human history. It was also, at times, chaotic and embarrassing. It secured hundreds of billions in investment commitments. It also failed to secure a single binding governance commitment that could prevent AI from being used to harm the very populations it claimed to serve. It produced genuine indigenous innovation that should make every Indian proud. It also revealed institutional cultures that confuse the appearance of innovation with its substance. It repositioned India as a credible, serious, sovereign voice in the global AI conversation. It also risked doing so on infrastructure that belongs to others.
All of these things are simultaneously true. And the philosophical point the one I keep returning to is that India’s relationship with its own ambition has always been complicated in precisely this way. This is a country capable of building a space programme on a shoestring and a welfare scheme with a billion beneficiaries in the same breath. It is a country that can produce the world’s most sophisticated AI researchers and the world’s most spectacular academic integrity failures in the same week, on the same stage.
The question is not whether India deserves to lead in AI. It does. The question is whether it will do the hard, boring, invisible work that actually makes leadership real the regulatory frameworks with teeth, the research institutions with genuine autonomy, the startup ecosystem with patient capital rather than hype cycles, and the governance discourse that does not confuse a well-attended expo with a well-governed technology.
“India held a mirror up to the world this week. The world looked into it. So did India. What it sees next — and what it chooses to do about it will determine everything.”
I left that summit with pride. I left it with concern. I left it with a stubborn, irrational, very Indian conviction that both feelings are necessary and that the country is, somewhere in the uncomfortable space between them, slowly, imperfectly, and perhaps more honestly than it has ever managed before, beginning to find its way.
The summit lit a fire. Whether it warms the house or burns it down depends on the choices made in the quiet after the cameras go home.
About the Author: Aman is a technology strategist, content creator, and observer of enterprise AI transformation, writing at the intersection of technology, governance, and Indian ambition. He attended the India AI Impact Summit 2026 across multiple days as an independent observer.