India’s AI Impact Summit puts open ecosystems first, spotlighting AI4Bharat, Qualcomm’s open platforms and massive compute investments to democratise AI access nationwide.
India will host the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi from February 16–20, convening global technology leaders, researchers, policymakers and investors around a clear priority: building inclusive, socially responsible and widely accessible AI. The event’s guiding sutras — People, Planet, Progress — place open ecosystems and public digital infrastructure at the centre of deployment.
The strongest open signal comes from Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder and Chairman, Infosys, whose AI4Bharat open AI initiative has received Rs 700 million in funding to build models for India’s 22 official languages. Nilekani describes India as the “use-case capital of AI” and argues AI must be “inclusive, not extractive”.
Infrastructure scale follows. Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google & Alphabet, announced a $15 billion AI hub and data centre in Visakhapatnam to provide gigawatt-scale compute, saying it will “bring our industry-leading technology to enterprises and users in India, accelerating AI innovation”. Partner Sunil Bharti Mittal, Founder and Chairman, Bharti Airtel, is extending AI-led telecom networks to broaden access.
At the hardware core, Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, Nvidia, characterised modern facilities as “AI factories” producing valuable “tokens”, powered by new Grace Blackwell servers and DGX systems.
Industry adoption is expanding through Mukesh Ambani’s vision of “AI Everywhere for Everyone”, while Cristiano Amon, CEO, Qualcomm, pushes edge AI and has acquired Arduino to open-source its AI computing platform.
From Bill Gates’ focus on AI that should “save and improve millions of lives” to OpenAI, Anthropic and Tata’s enterprise AI drives, the summit frames AI not as closed technology, but as shared national infrastructure.
