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India Hosts First Global South AI Impact Summit

India Hosts First Global South AI Impact Summit in New Delhi

Published 2 days ago

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Above: Visitors explore the Engineering AI Service pavilion at the India-AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, India, on Feb. 17, 2026. Image credit: Sanjeev Verma/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

The Spin

India's AI summit exposed the country's fundamental inability to execute on technology ambitions, with stolen products, hours-long queues and cash-only food stalls revealing that basic operational competence remains absent. Celebrity-filled panels and political spectacle cannot substitute for real builders, engineers and PhDs who actually write code and deploy systems at scale. Until India stops treating technology as performance art and starts investing in deep innovation rather than service aggregation, it will remain a perpetual "potential superpower" instead of an actual one.

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India has positioned itself as the seventh-largest AI investor globally, with $7 billion in infrastructure, hosting 1.8180,000 lakh startups and deploying 38,000 GPUs through the IndiaAI Mission, thatwhich will generate $1.7 trillion in economic impact. The AI Impact Summit brings together over 100 countries and 13 dedicated pavilions to shape global AI governance with a human-centric approach. With 6 million professionals driving digital transformation and Karnataka leading 39% of Gen-AI startups, India has successfully transitioned from a back-office hub to a global AI powerhouse.