India is positioning itself as a major hub for artificial intelligence, demonstrated by its recent four-day AI Impact Summit. The event, designed to attract significant AI investment, drew executives from prominent AI labs and Big Tech firms including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, alongside heads of state. Key figures such as Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis were in attendance. India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, delivered a speech with French President Emmanuel Macron.

A core focus of India's AI strategy is financial commitment and infrastructure development. The country has earmarked $1.1 billion for a state-backed venture capital fund, dedicated to investing in AI and advanced manufacturing startups nationwide. Additionally, India's tech minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, announced an ambitious goal to attract over $200 billion in investment for AI infrastructure within the next two years. Indian conglomerate Adani is committing $100 billion to build renewable energy-powered AI data centers in India by 2035, expecting this to catalyze an additional $150 billion investment in areas like server manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure, sovereign cloud platforms, and supporting industries.

Major global AI players are expanding their presence in India. OpenAI revealed that India accounts for over 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, making it the second-largest user base after the U.S., with Indians also leading in student usage. 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 aspirations to scale up to 1 gigawatt. Anthropic has also established its first Indian office in Bengaluru, noting that India is the second-biggest user of its Claude models after the U.S. Anthropic is collaborating with IT giant Infosys to deploy Claude models and tools, including Claude code, to Indian enterprises, initially focusing on the telecommunications sector with a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence.

Significant investments are flowing into Indian AI startups and infrastructure. Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity fundraise, with plans to raise an additional $600 million in debt and deploy over 20,000 GPUs. Bengaluru-based C2i secured $15 million in Series A funding from Peak XV, Yali Deeptech, and TDK Ventures, to develop power solutions for data centers. In a major compute deployment, UAE’s G42 teamed up with U.S.-based chip maker Cerebras, along with Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), to deploy 8 exaflops of compute in India via a supercomputer.

The impact of AI on the Indian IT services sector was a key discussion point. HCL CEO Vineet Nayyar stated that Indian IT companies would prioritize profit generation over being job creators, as fears of AI disrupting the IT services sector grow. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, controversially predicted that industries like IT services and BPOs could