Because New Delhi didn’t really host a nerd conference.
What it hosted was a very public tug-of-war over power. Who gets compute.And writes the rules.So sells the “AI stack.” Who ends up renting their future from somebody else’s cloud and smiling through it.
Sure, there were ideas. But the politics? Louder. Way louder.
AI Summit 2026 India: what happened
AI Summit 2026 India ran five days in New Delhi, hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with over 250,000 registered attendees and delegations from around the world.
Here’s the gist people kept circling back to, even when they pretended they weren’t:
- India pushed a frame the global AI race isn’t only U.S. Vs China.
- Reliance and Adani promised $210 billion combined for AI and data infrastructure. Big number, big headline.
- OpenAI partnered with Tata Group. And Anthropic partnered with Infosys and opened an office in Bengaluru.
- And the whole thing had real-world mess written all over it. Lines. Traffic. Visa drama. Big-name no-shows. Even a robo-dog mini-scandal that caught fire online.
AI Summit 2026 India and geopolitics: the “third way” pitch
What grabbed me most is how the summit treated AI like foreign policy instead of “just software.”
NBC News caught the core message: India wants to widen the AI conversation beyond Washington and Beijing, and sell itself as a serious alternative voice, especially for the Global South. The New York Times echoed the same vibe. India looking for a path “between the U.S. And China,” using tech as diplomacy, and claiming a moral lane for developing countries.
So what did that look like on the ground?
- The U.S. And China didn’t send heads of state. The U.S. Delegation was led by Michael Kratsios from the White House OSTP. China’s absence was partly linked to Lunar New Year timing.
- The U.S. Message leaned toward local governance and pushed back on heavy centralized oversight. You’ve heard the line before: don’t over-regulate. It pops up in these rooms like a bad chorus.
- India kept signaling something pretty blunt: we want autonomy. Not alignment-by-default.
And as a developer… I read all this and think, “Cool, so my model provider isn’t just a tech choice anymore. It’s a geopolitical choice.” Whether I like it or not.
Big money, big infrastructure, and the compute reality nobody can dodge
On paper, the summit numbers looked enormous. The one everyone repeated was the $210B combined pledge from Reliance and Adani for domestic AI and data infrastructure. (NBC News)
But NBC News dropped the stat explains the nervous energy behind the speeches:
- The U.S. And China together control about 85% of global AI computing power. (NBC News)
So when people at AI Summit 2026 India say “AI sovereignty,” they aren’t just waving flags. They’re talking about the stuff you can’t hand-wave away:
- GPUs and accelerators
- data centers, plus the energy to run them
- supply chains, chips, critical minerals
- access to models, open weights vs closed APIs
NBC also reported India formally joined Pax Silica, a U.S.-led coalition aimed at building resilient supply chains for critical minerals. Politics, sure. But politics with steel beams and power cables behind it.
Chaos, optics, and why the messy parts mattered more than people admit
A lot of the online chatter around AI Summit 2026 India zoomed in on the weird stuff. I get it. The weird stuff is sticky.
But it wasn’t meaningless noise. It told you something.
From the reporting:
- Overcrowding, long lines, visa issues, and traffic disruption showed up early. (NBC News)
- Big no-shows happened. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang canceled last minute. Bill Gates pulled out hours before his keynote, saying he wanted the focus on summit priorities amid renewed scrutiny over his Epstein ties. (NBC News; POLITICO)
- A university demo went viral after a “locally built” robotic dog got identified as the Unitree Go2, a Chinese product that sells for about $2,800. (POLITICO. NBC News)
Then there’s the vibe-from-the-floor angle. A Reddit attendee said they spent hours dealing with entry and security, missed most sessions because of the venue layout and repeated checks, and walked away feeling a lot of talks were generic. Anecdotal, yes. Also… it lines up with the broader logistics-and-optics complaints.
Here’s why any of that matters. Credibility is part of power. If you’re pitching yourself as a serious AI hub, the unsexy basics like signage, movement, access, time management end up writing the story for you.
Anyone who’s ever been to a “big” conference knows this feeling. You don’t remember the third panel on “responsible innovation.” You remember the two-hour line, the hallway crush, and the moment you realized you were going to miss the one session you actually cared about. That’s just how humans work.
“Sovereignty,” open source, and the AI divide people kept dancing around
Mozilla’s write-up was the most honest read I’ve seen on what AI Summit 2026 India surfaced: the gap is widening between the “haves” and everyone else. Hyperscalers, frontier labs, countries with compute on one side. The rest of the world squinting at the door on the other.
A few things Mozilla highlighted:
- People couldn’t even agree on what “sovereignty” means. Still, most agreed AI shouldn’t be controlled by a tiny set of dominant companies.
- Regulation got dunked on constantly, especially the EU, and some of the criticism was factually sloppy. Governance turned into this taboo topic where nuance just… vanished.
- The “safety” talk didn’t disappear. It shifted away from apocalypse-only vibes toward near-term harms like bias, language and culture, jobs, inclusion, online safety.
Mozilla also argued the consensus is swinging toward open source being essential. Less “we rent intelligence” and more “we can inspect it, secure it, adapt it.”
If you want a steady baseline on what “regulation” means in 2026, instead of hallway hot takes, the European Commission’s overview of the EU AI Act is the cleanest reference point.
External link: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai
Practical takeaways (for builders, not diplomats)
So what do you do with “politics more than idea”? If you build software, you still have deadlines. You still have users. Nobody ships “geopolitics” to production.
But you can adjust how you build.
Here’s what I’m taking back to my own work after tracking AI Summit 2026 India:
Plan for model portability.
Hard-locking to one vendor API feels great until it doesn’t. Keep an abstraction layer. Give yourself room to swap providers, or move to open models later without rewriting your whole app while panicking.Treat multilingual and cultural performance like a first-class requirement.
NBC News mentioned a voluntary commitment around improving model performance across languages and cultural contexts. And in India, “works in English” is easy mode. Real mode is everything else.Watch infrastructure commitments the way you watch product roadmaps.
Pledges like the $210B only matter when they become shipped capacity. Until then, it’s just… noise with a press release.
I also use a tiny script to keep myself honest about public announcements over time. Dead simple. Still useful.
# Create a dated snapshot of a page for later diffing
URL="https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/indias-ai-summit-draws-global-leaders-big-pledges-chaos-rcna259855"
mkdir -p snapshots
curl -L "$URL" -o "snapshots/ai-summit-2026-india-$(date +%F).html"Later, diff the snapshots and see what changed. Headlines shift. Numbers get tweaked. Corrections appear. Politics moves fast. Receipts help.
Internal reading (if open models are on your mind after the summit)
If the open-source thread from AI Summit 2026 India hooked you, this internal piece is worth your time.
Internal link: https://www.basantasapkota026.com.np/2026/02/open-source-llms-vs-200-ai-plans.html
Closing thought: AI Summit 2026 India was politics because AI is power now
This summit didn’t just show off tools. It showed leverage. Concentrated compute, 85% stat, supplier dependence, investment pledges, and a growing push for open source and something people keep calling “real sovereignty.”
Even the chaos and memes mattered. Not because they were funny, but because perception is part of statecraft.
If you’ve been treating AI like “just another platform shift,” 2026 is where that story starts to crack. Map your own stack. Data, models, infra, vendors. Then ask yourself, quietly, before the next big decision lands on your desk: where are we dependent, and what’s our exit plan?
And if you’ve got a strong take on what “AI sovereignty” should mean in practice, I’d genuinely like to hear where you land.