The air in New Delhi is thick. Usually, it’s just the smog, but this week it’s a suffocating layer of optimism. The India AI Impact Summit 2026 has officially descended upon the capital, draped in the kind of corporate branding that suggests the future is finally fixed. They’re calling it "AI for Everyone." It’s a nice sentiment. It looks great on a tote bag.
I’ve spent three days walking through halls filled with the hum of high-end air conditioning and the louder hum of buzzwords. If you drank a shot every time a speaker mentioned "the common man," you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning by lunch. The pitch is simple: India, with its billion-plus data points, is going to leapfrog the West by making artificial intelligence a public utility. Like water. Or electricity. Except, you know, actually functional.
The stagecraft is impeccable. We saw demos of LLMs speaking Bhojpuri and Tamil, helping farmers diagnose crop wilt through a WhatsApp bot. It’s genuinely impressive until you ask about the hardware. That’s where the friction starts.
Beneath the talk of "democratization" lies a brutal, expensive reality. AI isn't some ethereal spirit; it’s a physical commodity made of silicon and staggering amounts of electricity. India is currently trying to build its own sovereign AI stack, but the invoice is eye-watering. The government’s $1.25 billion IndiaAI Mission is a lot of money until you realize a single high-end cluster of Nvidia chips can eat half that budget before you’ve even flipped the switch.
We’re told this tech will bridge the gap between the urban elite and the rural poor. Sure. But right now, the most tangible "impact" is the fleet of Teslas idling outside the venue. There’s a massive disconnect between the guy in the air-conditioned Bharat Mandapam talking about "inclusive growth" and the actual infrastructure required to run these models. You can’t run a sophisticated neural network on a patchy 4G connection in a village that gets six hours of power a day.
The trade-off is the real story here. To get these models running, the government is cozying up to the same Big Tech giants it spent the last five years trying to regulate into submission. There’s a quiet desperation in the air. We want the tech, but we don't want the strings. Google and Microsoft are here, smiling through the heat, ready to provide the "scaffolding" for India’s dreams. They aren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing it because 1.4 billion people represent the largest data set on the planet.
It's a data-for-development swap. It’s the old colonial trade route, just updated for the age of tokens and weights.
I sat through a panel on "AI Ethics in the Global South." It was mostly people in $800 suits talking about the dignity of labor. Meanwhile, just a few miles away, thousands of young Indians are spent in windowless rooms labeling images of traffic lights and storefronts for pennies to train the very models that will eventually render their "digital labor" obsolete. Nobody mentions the sweatshops of the algorithm. It ruins the vibe.
The summit's big reveal was a "National AI Portal" meant to provide compute access to startups. It’s a noble idea. But the waitlist is already longer than a line at a ration shop. If you’re a kid in a basement in Pune with a brilliant idea, you’re still fighting for scraps of GPU time while the big conglomerates—the ones who can afford the $40,000-per-chip entry fee—build their moats.
By the end of day three, the fatigue sets in. You realize the summit isn't about the tech. It’s about the optics of the tech. It’s a signal to the world that India is open for business, provided you don't look too closely at the cracks in the foundation. The rhetoric is all about "everyone," but the benefits are looking increasingly concentrated.
The organizers claim they’ve built a bridge to the future. Maybe they have. But they haven't mentioned the toll price yet.
As I left the venue, a delivery driver buzzed past on a moped, weaving through traffic while staring at a route-optimization app powered by the very AI we were celebrating inside. He didn't look like he felt particularly served by the "transformative" future. He just looked like he was trying to beat a timer.
How much of this "everyone" actually includes the person delivering the lunch?
