Aiming to attract more AI investment to the country, India is hosting a four-day AI Impact Summit this week, which will be attended by executives from leading AI labs and big techs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, as well as heads of state.
The event, which is expected to attract 250,000 people, will be attended by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to address French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday.
Key updates on the event include:
India has earmarked $1.1 billion for state-backed venture capital funds. The fund invests in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing startups across the country. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said India has over 100 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, second only to the US. He also said that most of the students using ChatGPT are Indian. Blackstone has acquired a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity financing. Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset and Nexus Venture Partners also invested. The company now plans to raise an additional $600 million in debt and deploy more than 20,000 GPUs. Bangalore-based C2i, which builds power solutions for data centers, has raised $15 million in Series A funding from Peak XV with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures. HCL CEO Vineet Nayar said Indian IT companies will focus on making profits rather than being job creators. The comments come as Indian IT stocks tumble on growing concerns that AI will disrupt the IT services sector. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, says that industries such as IT services and BPO (business process outsourcing) could be “almost completely obliterated” within five years due to AI. He told Hindustan Times that India’s 250 million young people should sell AI-based products and services to the rest of the world. AMD has partnered with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to develop rack-scale AI infrastructure based on AMD’s ‘Helios’ platform. Anthropic announced the opening of its first office in India in the city of Bangalore. According to the company, India is the second largest user of Claude, after Anthropic, Inc., which has partnered with IT giant Infosys to introduce tools such as Claude Model and Claude Code to Indian companies. First, the companies will bring AI tools to the telecommunications sector with a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence. Indian AI company Sarvam teases its upcoming smart glasses by the name Sarvam Kaze. The company has released several models in recent weeks, including a dubbing model, a text-to-speech model, a text-to-speech model, and a vision model for optical character recognition (OCR).
Indian conglomerate Adani has announced that it will allocate $100 billion to build AI data centers powered by renewable energy in India by 2035. The company said the investment will inject $150 billion into additional investments in areas such as server manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure, sovereign cloud platforms and support industries. Voice AI company Cartesia has partnered with India-based orchestrator Blue Machines to deploy enterprise voice solutions with local data residency. Cohere Labs launches multilingual model family with open weights supporting over 70 languages. These models can run on your local device. The company said it is also releasing models tuned for specific regions. OpenAI announced the opening of two new offices in India, in Bengaluru and Mumbai. OpenAI has also partnered with Tata Group to bring 100 megawatts of computing to India and aims to scale up to 1 gigawatt. India’s Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the country hopes to attract more than $200 billion in investment in AI infrastructure over the next two years. Indian vibe coding startup Emergent has announced that it has reached $100 ARR and launched a mobile app. Indian AI startup Sarvam has released two new open source models: Sarvam 30B and Sarvam 105B. Sarvam also announced partnerships with Qualcomm, HMD, and Bosch to deploy its AI models to devices such as smartphones, feature phones, cars, laptops, and smart glasses. Voice AI startup Gnani has released a zero-shot voice clone text-to-speech model called Vachana that supports 12 languages. BharatGen, a government-backed AI consortium, has released a 17 billion parameter model called Param 2 that works in 22 languages. Steaming service JioHotstar has announced that it will use ChatGPT to aid content discovery through conversational search. Sarvam has launched a ChatGPT competitor called Indus that supports multiple Indian languages. According to OpenAI, users aged 18-24 in India account for nearly 50% of ChatGPT usage in India. Indian technology company Tech Mahindra has released an 8 billion parameter Hindi-oriented model for education use cases. UAE’s G42 has partnered with US-based chipmaker Cerebras to bring 8 exaflops of computing to India through its supercomputer. Abu Dhabi’s Mohammed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Center for Advanced Computing Development (C-DAC) are also participating in the project. Sam Altman said on the sidelines of the India AI Summit that concerns about the amount of water used by AI are “absolutely false,” but acknowledged the issue of water usage when “we were doing evaporative cooling in data centers.” He also said that, strangely enough, humans use a lot of energy as they grow and process things around them. He thinks the debate over ChatGPT’s power consumption is “unfair.”
“But training people also requires a lot of energy,” Altman says. “It takes 20 years of your life and all the food you ate to become wiser.”
India said over 88 countries and organizations have signed the New Delhi AI Declaration in an effort to harness AI for social and economic benefits. These countries included the United States, China, and Russia. India has joined the US-led Pax Silica Group to create a smooth supply chain network for materials used in building AI infrastructure. Other member countries include the United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Qatar, Japan, Israel, South Korea, and Australia.
