New Delhi has become the centre of the global artificial intelligence conversation this week as top executives from the world’s biggest AI companies join political
leaders at a landmark summit aimed at shaping the future of the technology — and boosting India’s role in it.
Senior leaders from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are attending the India AI Impact Summit, as the country pushes to attract fresh investment and position itself as a global hub for applied AI.
India is already drawing massive commitments. Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon have collectively pledged around $68 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure investment in the country through 2030, underlining India’s growing importance to global technology supply chains.
Indian officials say the summit — the first global AI gathering of its scale to be held in the developing world — is designed to amplify the voices of emerging economies in international AI governance debates.
“The theme of the summit is welfare for all, happiness for all, reflecting our shared commitment to harnessing artificial intelligence for human-centric progress,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on X.
Global tech heavyweights take the stage
The speaker list reads like a who’s who of the AI industry. Executives addressing the summit include Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
Modi will also share the platform with French President Emmanuel Macron, who is visiting India as part of a wider bilateral trip.
Across New Delhi, large banners promoting the event — many featuring the prime minister’s portrait — line major roads, highlighting the scale of the government’s push to showcase India as a serious AI contender.
Deployment over dominance
Despite its ambitions, India has yet to produce a frontier AI model that rivals those developed in the United States or China. Instead, policymakers are betting on scale of deployment rather than cutting-edge model development.
The government’s latest Economic Survey urged a focus on “application-led innovation”, arguing that India’s advantage lies in using AI at population scale — across healthcare, education, agriculture and public services — rather than chasing ultra-expensive mega-models.
That strategy is already visible in usage trends. By late 2025, India had more than 72 million daily users of ChatGPT, making it OpenAI’s largest market worldwide.
Jobs anxiety and summit side effects
Rapid AI adoption, however, is fuelling concerns about job losses, particularly in India’s $283 billion IT services industry. Investment bank Jefferies has warned that call-centre revenues could fall by as much as 50% by 2030 as automation accelerates.
The summit itself is leaving a visible mark on the capital. Organisers expect more than 250,000 visitors and over 300 exhibitors at a 70,000-square-metre expo hosted at Bharat Mandapam, the $300 million convention complex in central Delhi.
The influx has sent luxury hotel prices soaring. A suite at the Taj Palace, typically priced around $2,200 a night, was briefly listed at more than $33,000, sparking disbelief on social media.
Anticipating heavy congestion, India’s Supreme Court issued a circular allowing lawyers to appear via video conferencing during summit week, citing traffic disruptions linked to the event.
As India hosts the world’s AI elite, the message from New Delhi is clear: the country wants a bigger say in how artificial intelligence is governed — and a larger share of the economic rewards it promises. Photo by Jernej Furman from Slovenia, Wikimedia commons.