India is making its most ambitious move yet to position itself at the center of global artificial intelligence governance. The AI Impact Summit 2026 runs February 15-20 in New Delhi, bringing together heads of state, technology CEOs, and policymakers from over 100 countries for what organizers are billing as the defining conversation about AI’s role in global development.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will inaugurate the event at Bharat Mandapam, hosting a leaders’ plenary, a CEO roundtable, and a state dinner. The message India is sending is deliberate: the Global South doesn’t just want a seat at the AI table—it wants to host the table.
Who’s Coming
The attendee list reads like a who’s who of global influence across politics and technology.
On the government side, French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Lula da Silva headline a diplomatic gathering that spans G7 and G20 divides. Leaders from the UAE, Singapore, and dozens of other nations round out a representation that genuinely reflects global breadth rather than just Western capitals.
The technology contingent is equally striking. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang will share rooms and roundtables—a gathering of AI’s most consequential figures outside of their usual Silicon Valley context. Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, Qualcomm’s Cristiano Amon, FedEx’s Raj Subramaniam, and Cadence’s Lip-Bu Tan round out the corporate representation. Bill Gates attends representing the philanthropic dimension of AI deployment in developing economies.
India’s domestic coordination runs through IT Secretary S. Krishnan alongside MeitY, NITI Aayog, and senior technology officers from Jio, Kotak, and Adani.
The diplomatic headline, however, is China. Joining as a partner nation for the first time, China is bringing its foundational AI models and seeking policy alignment—a notable development given the current tensions between Washington and Beijing over AI capabilities and export controls. India’s ability to host both American AI leaders and Chinese participation simultaneously underscores its emerging role as a genuine neutral convenor in a field that’s becoming increasingly geopolitically charged.
What’s on the Agenda
The six-day program is structured to move between high-level policy and on-the-ground application.
Plenary sessions will tackle global AI governance frameworks, ethics-by-design principles, and the question of sovereign AI capabilities—how nations can develop meaningful AI infrastructure without complete dependence on a handful of American or Chinese platforms.
CEO roundtables will focus on enterprise agent deployment at scale and workforce transformation, topics that have become urgent as companies like Intuit, Uber, and State Farm begin deploying AI agents across core business functions.
The AI-for-Good tracks are where India’s domestic priorities become most visible. Healthcare diagnostics feature prominently, including models developed around SGPGIMS’s Tele-ICU program that has been rolling out statewide. Agricultural optimization and climate modeling sessions reflect the priorities of nations where AI’s most consequential near-term applications aren’t enterprise software but food security and environmental resilience.
A startup pavilion will showcase more than 500 companies funded through the IndiaAI Mission grants. Global Impact Challenge winners will be announced across healthcare, education, and sustainability categories.
Delhi’s visible infrastructure upgrades—road improvements, airport signage, enhanced security—signal how seriously the Indian government is treating this as a national priority event rather than just another conference.
India’s Strategic Position
The summit arrives at a moment when India has built genuine momentum in AI development that gives its convening role substance rather than just ambition.
The IndiaAI Mission has allocated ₹10,000 crore for building a sovereign AI stack—infrastructure and capabilities that don’t depend entirely on foreign platforms. Yotta and JioCloud are scaling GPU clusters that are beginning to rival specialized Western providers. NITI Aayog has established 62 AI research labs. The UP AI City initiative represents serious commitment to physical infrastructure for AI development.
What India is articulating through this summit is a third path in global AI development. The United States is moving at commercial velocity, prioritizing capability and deployment speed. The European Union is emphasizing regulation and rights protection. India is arguing for a framework centered on affordable compute access, data sovereignty, and ethical alignment that serves the two-thirds of the world’s population that lives outside wealthy Western nations.
That positioning is genuinely differentiated. When Global South nations look at current AI development trajectories, they see capabilities concentrating in a small number of companies and countries, with deployment patterns shaped by the priorities of wealthy markets. India is making the case that this isn’t inevitable—and that governance frameworks should reflect broader human priorities from the beginning rather than as an afterthought.
Why the Timing Matters
The summit lands during an inflection point in AI development that makes its governance questions urgent rather than theoretical. Agentic AI systems are moving from demonstrations to real deployment across enterprise workflows. The question of how these systems should behave, who should govern them, and whose values they should reflect is shifting from academic to practical with considerable speed.
China’s first-time participation adds a dimension that no previous AI governance forum has managed. Getting American and Chinese AI leaders in the same rooms, under Indian diplomatic hosting, creates possibilities for dialogue that bilateral tensions would otherwise prevent. Whether that translates into meaningful policy alignment is uncertain, but the architecture for conversation is more valuable than it might appear.
Macron and Lula’s attendance bridges the G7 and G20 divide in ways that matter for global standard-setting. AI governance frameworks that only reflect wealthy nation priorities will face resistance and fragmentation. Frameworks developed with genuine Global South input have a better chance of becoming genuinely global.
What It Means in Practice
For the technology companies attending, the summit accelerates commercial relationships in one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing markets. Nvidia GPU supply discussions, Salesforce enterprise AI deployments, Qualcomm edge inference partnerships—these conversations happen faster when CEOs are in the same room as Indian government and business leaders.
For India domestically, the summit reinforces the IndiaAI Mission’s funding case and creates pressure for talent retention. The brain drain of Indian AI researchers to American companies and universities is a genuine strategic concern. Positioning India as a global AI hub rather than a talent exporter requires exactly this kind of visible commitment.
For the global AI governance conversation, India is asserting something important: that the nations most affected by AI’s transformative impacts—in agriculture, healthcare, education, and economic development—should have meaningful influence over how those systems are built and governed, not just how they’re eventually deployed.
The summit won’t resolve the deep tensions in global AI development. But it creates infrastructure for the conversations that need to happen—and it does so from a position of growing credibility rather than aspiration alone. India isn’t asking for a seat at the table this time. It built the table and sent out the invitations.
