The biggest players in the global technology industry gathered in the Indian capital: Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and industrial magnate Mukesh Ambani. All under one roof at the four-day India AI Impact Summit, which attracted more than 250,000 visitors. India sent the world a clear message: we want to be more than just a source of cheap labor for technology companies.
Billions in investment
The figures announced at the summit are breathtaking. Indian conglomerate Adani announced a $100 billion investment in the construction of data centers powered by renewable energy by 2035. This investment is expected to attract another $150 billion into related sectors, such as server manufacturing and sovereign cloud platforms.
India has also allocated $1.1 billion for a state-backed venture capital fund that will support startups in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing. Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw then added an ambitious target: to attract more than $200 billion into AI infrastructure by 2028.
Meanwhile, Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million funding round, with the company planning to deploy more than 20,000 GPUs. OpenAI, for its part, entered into a partnership with the Tata Group for 100 megawatts of computing capacity in India, with plans to scale to 1 gigawatt.
India as the world's second-largest ChatGPT market
At the summit, Sam Altman revealed a figure that surprised many. India has more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, placing it second only to the United States. Young people aged 18 to 24 account for nearly 50% of all ChatGPT usage in the country. India also has the largest number of students actively using ChatGPT.
Anthropic responded in its own way: it is opening its first office in India in Bengaluru and has entered into a partnership with IT giant Infosys to deploy Claude models in Indian enterprises. India is Anthropic's second-largest market after the US. OpenAI is following the same path, opening two new offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai.
Domestic AI infrastructure is growing like an avalanche
But India does not want to be merely a consumer of foreign technologies. Domestic AI startup Sarvam released two new open-source models: Sarvam 30B and Sarvam 105B and entered into partnerships with Qualcomm, HMD, and Bosch to bring its models to smartphones, cars, and smart glasses. It also launched its own chatbot, Indus, which supports multiple Indian languages and is taking direct aim at ChatGPT's throne.
The government-backed consortium BharatGen released the Param 2 model, which has 17 billion parameters and works in 22 languages. Tech Mahindra added a Hindi-focused model for education. Cohere Labs launched a family of multilingual models supporting more than 70 languages. India is simply building its own AI stack from the ground up.
A shadow over the IT sector: Will jobs disappear?
However, the mood at the summit darkened somewhat here. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, bluntly said that the IT services and BPO industries could "almost completely disappear within five years" because of AI. HCL chief Vineet Nayyar added that Indian IT companies would focus on profits, not job creation. These comments came as Indian IT stocks were experiencing a sell-off.
In its commentary on the summit, The Hindu highlighted a deeper problem: while India is enthusiastically embracing AI, the infrastructure, capital, and models are still largely based abroad. A strategy focused mainly on deploying foreign models rather than training them may be risky in the long term. The low labor-cost advantage that propelled India to the top during the IT services era will be much smaller in the AI world.
More than 88 countries signed the New Delhi Declaration on AI, including the US, China, and Russia. India also joined the US-led Pax Silica group to secure AI infrastructure supply chains. The summit showed that India has the ambition, capabilities, and enthusiasm. The question is: can it turn them into genuine technological sovereignty, or will it remain merely the largest customer of the world's AI giants?
