Dear Readers,

When India's Prime Minister Modi asked Sam Altman and Dario Amodei to raise their clasped hands in a show of global AI unity, both quietly refused - and that single awkward fist-bump told you more about the state of AI in 2026 than any keynote ever could. In today's issue, we unpack the India AI Impact Summit, where over $200 billion in investment commitments collided with overcrowded halls, geopolitical chess moves, and a fundamental question: is India becoming a true AI superpower or the world's most important client?

This summit was a masterclass in ambition meeting reality at a planetary scale: From Reliance's $110 billion infrastructure pledge to Anthropic's new Bengaluru office, from sovereign language models to the tension between "AI democratization" and deepening U.S. tech dependency.

Let's dig in.

All the best,

Kim Isenberg

On the first morning at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, the vibe wasn’t “quiet policy conference.” It was closer to a mega-expo where geopolitics, venture capital, and engineering ambition all tried to speak at once and sometimes literally couldn’t, because the logistics buckled under the size of the crowd. Reuters described long queues, overcrowding, confusing entry rules, and sudden security sweeps that forced people to scramble for their belongings.

“India's AI Impact Summit, an event meant to showcase the country's technology ambitions, faced a wave of online criticism on its opening day on Monday as attendees reported long queues, overcrowding and organizational lapses at the New Delhi venue.”

That chaos was metaphorical insofar as the summit itself was trying to project the opposite message: India as a country that can run AI at a population scale. Not just build prototypes, not just write principles, but actually deploy systems into a society of 1.4+ billion people, across languages, income brackets, and wildly uneven infrastructure.

This was also the first time the “global AI summit” circuit landed in what Reuters calls the “developing world,” after earlier gatherings in Bletchley Park (2023), Seoul (2024), and Paris (2025). Those earlier meetings were dominated by safety declarations and voluntary commitments; New Delhi tried to pull the conversation down from the abstract toward roads, power, chips, cloud regions, data centers, skills, and real services. The summit’s official framing was “welfare for all, happiness for all,” a deliberately human-centric slogan posted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

AS Modi stood on stage, flanked by Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, and Dario Amodei, and asked them all to raise their clasped hands in a gesture of global unity, two of them quietly refused. Altman and Amodei, the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic, stood shoulder to shoulder but kept their hands apart, eventually settling for an awkward fist-pump instead. The image went viral within hours. And it told you everything you needed to know about the state of global AI in February 2026: enormous ambition, staggering investment, genuine progress, and rivalries so deep that not even a diplomatic photo-op on foreign soil could paper over them

So if you’ve followed India’s AI headlines over the last two years, you’ve probably noticed how easy it is to mix up similarly named events, and how quickly the story has scaled from governance talk to hard infrastructure and money.

So here’s the real question after the India AI Impact Summit 2026: was New Delhi just hosting another conference - or did India position itself as the place where AI’s next phase becomes real?