India is strategically positioning itself as a global leader in artificial intelligence, a commitment underscored by its hosting of the four-day AI Impact Summit. This significant event attracts top executives from leading AI laboratories and major technology 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 are in attendance. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is also scheduled to deliver a speech with French President Emmanuel Macron, highlighting the international collaboration at play. The summit aims to attract substantial AI investment into the country, expecting 250,000 visitors.

In a tangible move to bolster its AI ecosystem, India has earmarked $1.1 billion for a state-backed venture capital fund dedicated to investing in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing startups nationwide. Furthermore, India’s tech minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, has articulated an ambitious goal to attract over $200 billion in investment for AI infrastructure within the next two years, signaling the country's aggressive pursuit of AI leadership.

Global AI giants are increasingly recognizing India’s potential and establishing a stronger presence. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed that India accounts for over 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, ranking second only to the U.S., and also boasts the highest number of students utilizing ChatGPT. OpenAI has announced plans to open two new offices in India, in Bengaluru and Mumbai, and has partnered with the Tata group to deploy 100 megawatts of compute, with an aspiration to scale this to 1 gigawatt. Similarly, Anthropic is opening its first office in Bengaluru, noting that India is the second-largest user of its Claude models after the U.S. Anthropic is also collaborating with IT giant Infosys to deploy Claude models and tools like Claude code to Indian enterprises, initially focusing on the telecommunications sector with a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence. Other international players are also making significant moves: Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity fundraise, with Neysa planning an additional $600 million in debt to deploy over 20,000 GPUs. AMD is teaming up with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to develop rack-scale AI infrastructure based on AMD’s “Helios” platform. Additionally, Cohere Labs launched a family of multilingual models with open weights, supporting over 70 languages and capable of running on local devices, including models tuned for specific regions.

India's domestic AI landscape is vibrant with innovation and investment. Bengaluru-based C2i, a startup building power solutions for data centers, successfully raised $15 million in a Series A round. Indian AI company Sarvam is making waves with its upcoming smart glasses, Sarvam Kaze, and has already released several models, including dubbing, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and vision models for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Sarvam further announced two new open-sourced models, Sarvam 30B and Sarvam 105B, and partnered with Qualcomm, HMD, and Bosch to deploy its AI models across various devices like smartphones, feature phones, cars, laptops, and smartglasses. The Indian conglomerate Adani has committed a massive $100 billion to build AI data centers powered by renewable energy in India by 2035, anticipating an additional $150 billion investment in related sectors such as server manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure, and sovereign cloud platforms. Voice AI company Cartesia is partnering with India-based orchestrator Blue Machines to deploy voice solutions for enterprises with local data residency. Government-backed AI consortium BharatGen also released Param 2, a 17 billion parameter model that functions across 22 languages. Other notable developments include Indian vibe-coding startup Emergent reaching $100 in Annual Recurring Revenue and launching a mobile app, and voice AI startup Gnani releasing Vachana, a zero-shot voice cloning text-to-speech model supporting 12 languages. Even streaming service JioHotstar plans to integrate ChatGPT for enhanced content discovery through conversational search.

However, this AI transformation also brings discussions about its impact on traditional industries. HCL CEO Vineet Nayyar indicated that Indian IT companies would prioritize profit generation over job creation, amidst growing concerns about AI disrupting the IT services sector. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, went further, predicting that industries like IT services and Business Process Outsourcing (BPOs) could