The India AI Impact Summit 2026, held in New Delhi from February 16 to 21, emerged as a pivotal moment in the global AI landscape. Inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on February 19, the summit featured addresses from French President Emmanuel Macron and UN Secretary‑General António Guterres, underscoring its international significance. The event, originally scheduled to conclude on February 20, was extended by one day due to overwhelming public interest, with exhibition hours extended into the evening. (en.wikipedia.org)
Several Indian AI models and hardware products were unveiled during the summit. Sarvam AI introduced new large language models—30‑billion and 105‑billion parameter variants using mixture‑of‑experts architecture—as well as text‑to‑speech, speech‑to‑text, and vision models. The company also showcased Kaze smartglasses, its first hardware product, which Prime Minister Modi tested at the expo. (en.wikipedia.org)
Gnani.ai, a Bengaluru‑based startup, launched Vachana TTS, a text‑to‑speech model capable of cloning human voices across 12 Indian languages using just 10 seconds of reference audio. Additionally, the government‑backed BharatGen Param2 model—a 17‑billion parameter multimodal model supporting 22 Indian languages—was introduced. (en.wikipedia.org)
On the infrastructure front, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw outlined India’s “whole‑of‑nation” AI strategy, including plans to add more than 20,000 GPUs to the existing 38,000 under the IndiaAI Compute Portal. Microsoft announced a commitment to invest US$50 billion by the end of the decade to bring AI to lower‑income countries. (en.wikipedia.org)
The summit also achieved a Guinness World Record for the most pledges received for an AI responsibility campaign in 24 hours—250,946 valid pledges collected between February 16 and 17, far exceeding the initial target of 5,000. (en.wikipedia.org)
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 marked a significant shift in the global AI narrative. It combined technological innovation, infrastructure planning, and public engagement, positioning India as a rising hub in the AI ecosystem. The unveiling of new models, hardware, and strategic commitments signals a growing emphasis on sovereign AI capabilities and inclusive development.