Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his pitch this week that India can play a leading role in the artificial intelligence boom with a conference featuring tech stars from around the world. It suffered more than a few hitches.
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) dropped out after early promotion; Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates withdrew later. Many attendees ran into trouble just getting into the grand Bharat Mandapam venue in New Delhi on Monday and logistics remained an ordeal all week. Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man, had so much trouble getting through security that his speech — announcing the biggest deal of the India AI Impact Summit — was delayed.
Even so, Modi gave a forceful demonstration of the country’s influence. He gathered many of the most prominent names in the tech industry, including the chief executives of Alphabet Inc, OpenAI and Anthropic PBC, as well as the India-born CEOs of global corporate icons like FedEx Corp. The prime day of the summit was so jam-packed that celebrity leaders like Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were allocated a mere five to 12 minutes each.
Photo: AFP
“It’s one thing to say you’re the leader of the Global South and it’s another to come across as the leader of the Global South,” said Reema Bhattacharya, head of Asia risk insights at advisory firm Verisk Maplecroft. “They’ve achieved what they wanted to achieve.”
The event mixed moments of genuine promise with evidence of India’s constraints as the global AI race accelerates. Similar to US President Donald Trump, Modi is able to elicit effusive praise and big promises from industry and government leaders, with Ambani pledging US$110 billion for building out artificial intelligence projects across India over the next seven years.
Speakers constantly praised the prime minister for his leadership and referred to him in the honorific, Shri Narendra Modi Ji.
Photo: AFP
However, the country still lags in high-end computing infrastructure that is necessary to build frontier large language models such as those produced by Silicon Valley companies or the coterie of Chinese upstarts that now sit atop many AI benchmark lists. Even the most efficient AI systems require tens of billions of dollars to build and operate, in a capital-intensive contest that US Big Tech in recent weeks escalated with plans for US$650 billion in new spending this year.
Modi used the summit to argue for a model of AI development that sits in the middle lane between the corporate-led ecosystem of the US and state-backed China push. At the summit’s busiest day, inclusion and human-centered design took center stage.
“We have talent, energy capacity and policy clarity,” Modi said in Hindi, translated via AI into various languages. “AI is like GPS. It can show the direction, but where we want to go must be decided by us.”
Photo: Reuters
He positioned India as the tech leader of the Global South — emerging economies, often previously colonized — that are eager to deploy AI but wary of aligning with one tech bloc or another. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reinforced that message, as did French President Emmanuel Macron, who sat alongside Modi at the gala with the ease of a longtime friend.
“The future of AI cannot be decided by a handful of countries or left to the whims of a few billionaires,” Guterres said.
The unifying message was that countries beyond the US and China want to be more than potential markets for AI companies. They want access to the best technologies, influence over regulation and the opportunity to share in the potential profits.
“India is trying to sort of set its terms,” Bhattacharya said. “The risk is India becoming this data colony for big tech where the proprietary, the value-added services are done elsewhere.”
One advantage the country has is the deep expertise of IT service firms like Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Infosys Ltd, leaders in helping the world’s corporations adopt new technologies like cloud computing and mobile services. They are now working with partners like Anthrophic and OpenAI to use their armies of consultants to help companies figure out how to use AI.
Tata Group chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran said on stage he sees the integration of AI and AI agents as a big opportunity for IT providers because of their understanding of the needs and opportunities for large-scale customers.
The Tata Group, maker of Jaguar Land Rover SUVs, said this week that it will partner with OpenAI to create as much as 1 gigawatt in data center capacity.
While India has not had a national AI champion to compete with the world’s leaders, an Indian startup called Sarvam used the spotlight of the summit to launch its own AI model, tailored from the ground up for use in the South Asian nation. The service is voice-based and accessible through nearly two dozen Indian languages, which the company believes will be a competitive advantage in a country of 1.45 billion where the vast majority cannot read, write or type in English.
“Sovereignty matters much more in AI than building the biggest models,” co-founder Vivek Raghavan said at an event in Delhi.
Another embarrassing incident came when a private university was booted out of the AI exhibition after it allegedly misrepresented a Chinese-made robot dog as its own product. The creator of that machine, Hangzhou Yushu Technology Co (杭州宇樹科技), better known as Unitree Robotics, meanwhile was wowing viewers of the Lunar New Year TV gala with its latest humanoids performing acrobatics with humanlike fluidity.
India might not be able to match the US or China in the spending required for AI development, but it was clear that Modi’s conference tapped into a deep undercurrent of angst around the way this once-in-a-generation technology is evolving. In countries beyond the two giants, business and political leaders see the risk that they will end up at the mercy of US or Chinese tech giants — or worse at the mercy of Washington or Beijing. They want an alternative to that bleak future.
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