All the key updates from the current India AI Impact Summit

India Hosts Major AI Impact Summit to Attract Global Investment

India is making a significant push to become a global hub for artificial intelligence by organizing a four-day AI Impact Summit. The event has drawn top executives from leading AI companies and technology giants such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, alongside prominent government leaders.

With an anticipated attendance of 250,000 participants, the summit features high-profile figures including Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Mukesh Ambani (Reliance), and Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind).

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron are scheduled to address the gathering together on Thursday.

Key Announcements and Highlights

• India has allocated $1.1 billion to a government-supported venture capital fund aimed at supporting AI and advanced manufacturing startups nationwide.
• Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, revealed that India is home to over 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, making it the second-largest user base after the United States. He also noted that Indian students are the most active users of ChatGPT globally.
• Blackstone has acquired a controlling interest in Indian AI firm Neysa as part of a $600 million equity fundraising round, with additional investments from Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners. Neysa plans to secure another $600 million in debt and deploy over 20,000 GPUs.
• Bengaluru-based C2i, focused on power solutions for data centers, secured $15 million in Series A funding from Peak XV, with Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures also participating.
• Vineet Nayyar, CEO of HCL, stated that Indian IT firms will prioritize profitability over job creation, as concerns grow about AI's impact on IT sector employment and stock performance.
• Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, predicted that sectors like IT services and BPOs could “almost completely disappear” within five years due to AI advancements. He encouraged India’s 250 million youth to focus on developing and selling AI-driven products and services worldwide.
• AMD and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) are collaborating to build advanced AI infrastructure using AMD’s “Helios” platform.
• Anthropic announced the opening of its first Indian office in Bengaluru, noting that India is its second-largest market for Claude, after the U.S.
• Anthropic is also joining forces with Infosys to introduce Claude models and tools to Indian businesses, starting with the telecom sector and establishing a dedicated Anthropic Center of Excellence.
• Indian AI company Sarvam previewed its upcoming smart glasses, Sarvam Kaze, and has recently launched several AI models, including those for dubbing, speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and OCR.

• Adani, a major Indian conglomerate, has pledged $100 billion to develop AI-powered data centers using renewable energy by 2035, expecting to attract an additional $150 billion in related sectors.
• Voice AI firm Cartesia is partnering with Blue Machines to deliver enterprise voice solutions with local data residency in India.
• Cohere Labs introduced a suite of open multilingual AI models supporting over 70 languages, optimized for local devices and regional needs.
• OpenAI announced plans to open two new offices in Bengaluru and Mumbai.
• OpenAI is also collaborating with the Tata group to provide 100 megawatts of AI computing power in India, with ambitions to scale up to 1 gigawatt.
• India’s technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw stated that the country aims to draw over $200 billion in AI infrastructure investment within the next two years.
• Emergent, an Indian AI startup, reported reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue just eight months after launch and has released a mobile application.
• Sarvam unveiled two new open-source AI models: Sarvam 30B and Sarvam 105B.
• Sarvam also announced collaborations with Qualcomm, HMD, and Bosch to integrate its AI models into devices such as smartphones, feature phones, vehicles, laptops, and smart glasses.
• Voice AI startup Gnani introduced Vachana, a zero-shot voice cloning text-to-speech model supporting 12 languages.
• BharatGen, a government-supported AI consortium, launched Param 2, a 17-billion-parameter model capable of working in 22 languages.
• Streaming platform JioHotstar will leverage ChatGPT to enhance content discovery through conversational search.
• Sarvam debuted Indus, a ChatGPT competitor supporting multiple Indian languages.
• OpenAI reported that users aged 18-24 account for nearly half of ChatGPT usage in India.
• Tech Mahindra, an Indian technology firm, released an 8-billion-parameter Hindi-focused model for educational applications.
• UAE’s G42 and U.S.-based Cerebras are working together to deploy 8 exaflops of computing power in India via a new supercomputer, in partnership with MBZUAI and India’s C-DAC.
• During the summit, Sam Altman addressed concerns about AI’s water consumption, calling them “totally fake,” but acknowledged that evaporative cooling in data centers was a past issue.
• Altman also remarked that humans themselves consume significant energy as they grow and learn, suggesting that criticisms of ChatGPT’s energy use are “unfair.”

“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman noted. “It takes about 20 years of life and all the food you consume in that period before you become knowledgeable.”