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 the majority of students using ChatGPT are also 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. The company said the country is Claude’s second-largest user after the United States.
