New Delhi’s Power Play: India AI Impact Summit 2026 Redefines the Global Race

As of Monday, February 16, 2026, New Delhi has officially become the epicenter of the artificial intelligence world. The India AI Impact Summit, hosted at the sprawling Bharat Mandapam, has attracted the “Big Three” of frontier AI—OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—alongside a delegation of over 20 heads of state.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s objective is clear: leverage India’s 1.4 billion citizens and its massive Aadhaar-based digital rails to pivot from being the “world’s back office” to its primary AI training ground.

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The Global Stage: New Delhi as the New AI Capital

The summit’s guest list reads like a Who’s Who of the Silicon Valley elite. While Nvidia’s Jensen Huang reportedly withdrew at the last hour due to “unforeseen circumstances,” the presence of Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai underscores India’s rising clout.

• Keynote Highlights: French President Emmanuel Macron will open the plenary sessions on February 19, focusing on global AI safety and digital sovereignty.

• The “India Stack” Advantage: Government officials are highlighting how AI can be layered over existing payment (UPI) and identity (Aadhaar) systems to “compress decades of development into years.”

Sovereign Intelligence: BharatGen and the Param2 Model

The most anticipated technical reveal is Param2, developed by the government-backed BharatGen consortium.

• The Specs: A 17-billion parameter foundation model utilizing a “Mixture of Experts” (MoE) architecture.

• Language Native: Unlike US models that often rely on translation layers, Param2 is trained natively on data from 22 Indian languages, ensuring cultural and contextual accuracy in sectors like governance, healthcare, and law.

• Deployment: The model is already being piloted in MahaGPT (Maharashtra Government) and within the Ministry of Culture’s Gyan Bharatam initiative to digitize millions of manuscripts.

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Investigative Angle: Why Silicon Valley is Courting Bharat

Our analysis suggests that the rush to New Delhi isn’t just about diplomacy; it’s about data survival.

The Strategy: As Western internet data becomes “exhausted” or restricted by copyright lawsuits, India represents the last great frontier of untapped, diverse human data. By setting up local operations, firms like OpenAI and Anthropic are positioning themselves to access “non-internet data”—real-world interactions in farming, clinics, and classrooms—that will train the next generation of reasoning agents.

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[INDIA’S AI COMPETITIVE EDGE: 2026 STATS]

Voice-First Future: Sarvam AI and the Next Billion Users

While text-based LLMs dominate the West, India is a voice-first nation. Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based startup backed by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures, is stealing the spotlight with its new audio-native model.

• Code-Mixing Genius: The model is specifically designed to understand “Hinglish” and other code-mixed speech, where users switch between languages mid-sentence.

• Direct Action: Unlike traditional systems that convert speech to text and then to a command, Sarvam’s model aims for “Speech-to-Command,” triggering API actions directly from voice input to reduce latency for farmers and gig workers.

Next Steps

If you are a developer or tech founder, you should monitor the BharatGen API release scheduled for the end of the summit, as it will likely offer the most cost-effective way to build for regional Indian markets. Furthermore, for those tracking global tech policy, you should watch for the “Delhi Declaration on AI” on February 20, which is expected to set new norms for AI safety across the Global South.

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