The summit is the fourth in an annual series that began in UK in 2023, before moving to Korea, and then France.
Global business leaders and heads of states all flocked to New Delhi this week to attend India’s AI Impact Summit 2026, which just concluded today (20 February).
The summit is the fourth in an annual series that began in UK in 2023, before moving to Korea, and then France last year.
India has huge aspirations to become a leader in AI – and overall, the billions in investments announced from Big Tech leaders this past week could mean that the fast-growing economy might be on the right track.
But as The New York Times puts it: “India brims with tech talent but not the companies that command it.” While slow to develop on the technology itself, India offers a very large AI user base (100m weekly ChatGPT users alone are from India) and huge under-employed workforce.
Outside the summit, however, disorganisation was rife. Blocked roads forced delegates to walk kilometres to reach the summit and wait in long queues. Meanwhile, dozens of New Delhi’s poorest accused state leaders of forcibly displacing their makeshift homes to ‘beautify’ the streets for the incoming international guests.
Though as that went on, AI leaders including OpenAI, Microsoft and Nvidia made some big announcements.
Microsoft’s $50bn ‘global south’ pledge
Microsoft said it is on its way to invest $50bn in the “global south” – a term used to refer to the world’s developing countries. Research from the company finds that AI usage in the “global north” is roughly twice that of the “global south”. The company said that the investment will be used to help increase AI usage in the region.
The Bill Gates-founded company wants to build the infrastructure needed for better AI diffusion in the country, help develop multilingual and multicultural AI capabilities, enable local AI innovations, and be able to measure AI diffusion better to guide future policies and investments in the tech.
Last year, the company announced plans for around $17.5bn worth of AI investments in India.
Adani adds $100bn to AI data centre pot
Billionaire business mogul Gautam Adani’s company, the Adani Group, announced direct investments of $100bn to create the “world’s largest integrated data centre platform” in India.
The new investment adds to AdaniConnex’s already existing 2GW national data centre, and expands it to a 5GW target. These AI data centres will be powered with renewable energy, the company claimed.
Its plans for the mega data centre comes with existing partnerships with Google and Microsoft. The company said it is discussing plans for more large-scale campuses in India with other major players.
According to the Adani Group, the $100bn investment is expected to generate an additional $150bn across manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure and sovereign cloud platforms in the country by 2035. Together, it projects to create a $250bn AI infrastructure ecosystem in India over the decade.
Telco leader drops $110bn for compute
Indian telecommunications giant Reliance Industries and Jio – its digital business – announced 10trn rupees (around $110bn) in new investments to build AI computing infrastructure in the country.
Owner Mukesh Ambani said that the investment would fund what he described as India’s sovereign compute infrastructure, which would include multi-gigawatt-scale data centres, a nationwide edge computing network and new AI services integrated with Jio.
“This is not speculative investment, this is patient capital to build India,” Ambani said at the summit in New Delhi.
OpenAI becomes a TCS customer
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced that OpenAI will become its first customer in its recently announced data centre business, Hypervault, with an initial commitment of 100MW of AI capacity. The capacity, it said, can be eventually scaled up to 1GW.
The project is a part of OpenAI’s Stargate venture, a $500bn privately-funded initiative to build AI data centres across the globe.
Alongside infrastructure, the partnership will also deploy ChatGPT Enterprise across parent company Tata Group’s other subsidiaries over the next several years.
“Through OpenAI for India and our partnership with the Tata Group, we’re working together to build the infrastructure, skills, and local partnerships needed to build AI with India, for India, and in India, so that more people across the country can access and benefit from it,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed.
L&T teams up with Nvidia
Larsen & Toubro (L&T), on the other hand, claimed to be building India’s “largest gigawatt-scale AI factory” using Nvidia’s AI infrastructure, which includes its GPUs, CPUs networking and accelerated storage platforms.
The venture will scale Nvidia GPU clusters at the company’s data centres in Chennai and Mumbai.
“AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in human history – everyone will use it, every company will be powered by it and every country will build it,” said Jensen Huang.
Its venture with L&T is “enabling AI factories at national scale”, he added, “ready to serve global and domestic AI demand”.
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