India AI Impact Summit 2026 brings global AI leaders to New Delhi

India is using the AI Impact Summit to formally step onto the main stage of global AI governance and industrial strategy. Getting the CEOs or co‑founders of Google, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Accenture and Infosys into the same room with Indian ministers is not just optics; it’s an opportunity to negotiate compute access, sovereign model support, chip manufacturing, and talent pipelines at scale. The thematic “chakras” of the summit—safe and trusted AI, skills, inclusion, and resource democratization—mirror the agenda of previous AI Action and Safety summits, but with an explicit Global South lens.

For the AGI race, India’s role has been underweight relative to its engineering talent and market size. A successful summit that produces concrete frameworks—say, around open infrastructure, multilingual models or shared safety benchmarks—could tilt that balance. New Delhi is signalling that it doesn’t want to be merely a customer of Western and Chinese AGI labs; it wants a seat in setting the norms and, eventually, contributing sovereign models and infrastructure. If the event leads to durable partnerships rather than photo‑ops, it could accelerate the diffusion of cutting‑edge systems into Indian industry and research, broadening the base of contributors to progress.