AI Summit 2026 LIVE Updates: India, US sign Pax Silica Declaration

As artificial intelligence rapidly shifts enterprise software from passive databases to active decision-makers, Srini Tallapragada, President and Chief Engineering and Customer Success Officer at Salesforce, and Arundhati Bhattacharya, President and CEO, Salesforce South Asia, believe the conversation must move beyond hype.

However, Tallapragada, in a conversation with AIM on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit, dismisses it as “a lazy narrative.” He notes that enterprise software hinges on “core and context.” Most companies will not rebuild mission-critical systems; they will rely on trusted platforms to handle complexity efficiently.

Bhattacharya concurs. “You’re not just looking at a model,” she says. “You’re looking at workflows, governance, observability, context.”

General Catalyst, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, has announced its intention to invest $5 billion in India over the next five years.

“India will build the next generation of global platform companies,” General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja said, adding that the firm sees Indian founders as uniquely positioned to develop technology for markets serving enormous populations.

In today’s FrontPage LIVE, we break down the biggest AI and tech developments shaping India’s future, from global AI rivalries and sovereign supercomputing to supply chain power plays and the future of software itself.

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw met Sundar Pichai at the India AI Summit to discuss data centre investments, AI in healthcare, renewable energy, and collaboration on global AI standards.

During his keynote at the Summit, Pichai emphasised the transformative potential of AI and cautioned that the world must ensure the digital divide does not evolve into an AI divide.

Razorpay and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) have collaborated to enable shopping with AI by bringing Agentic Payments to Anthropic's Claude. 

The offering allows users to order food, groceries, and everyday essentials from Zomato, Swiggy, and Zepto.

Unveiled at the India AI Impact Summit, the platform is currently in the pilot phase with a small group of users.

OpenAI has released new data called ‘OpenAI Signals’ highlighting how India is using its production compared to the global average. On ChatGPT, India is the company's largest market after the United States and has 100 million weekly active users.  

With regard to Codex, the company’s agentic AI coding tool, OpenAI says India is the fastest-growing market for the product, with weekly usage there increasing 4x over the last two weeks. Codex use for coding tasks is about 3x the global average.

Geographically, the highest use of coding capabilities is concentrated in India’s major technology hubs, with Telangana at number one, followed by Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Larsen & Toubro’s (L&T) next-generation sovereign artificial intelligence cloud platform, Vyoma, has entered into an exclusive partnership with legal intelligence firm Lexlegis.ai to deploy Legal AI solutions on its India-based sovereign cloud infrastructure.

The collaboration will see Lexlegis Legal AI hosted and operated on Vyoma’s Sovereign Cloud, ensuring that sensitive legal and regulatory data remains stored within India in accordance with domestic laws and regulatory frameworks.

The joint offering is targeted at law firms, enterprises, financial institutions, government bodies and other regulated industries that require advanced AI capabilities while meeting stringent data sovereignty and compliance norms.

The Andhra Pradesh government plans to collaborate with IBM, BharatGen and NxtGen to support its vision for building a Swadeshi AI stack, a sovereign AI technology framework. 

This stack will enable citizen-centric AI solutions in Telugu and other regional languages while strengthening governance and service delivery across priority sectors.

IBM, BharatGen and NxtGen will offer technical and strategic advice to the government related to the design, architecture, and operating model of the Swadeshi AI stack.

Speaking at India AI Summit 2026, Cristiano Amon, CEO and President of Qualcomm, said the telecom sector is headed for a transformation with 6G technology, which will harness AI.

"And that becomes a large-scale AI network that is processing and gets trained on all of the signals that happen at the network, and provides new capabilities. One of the biggest features of 6G is that the network is the sensing network at scale…” he said in a discussion.

Amon said smartphones, which are currently viewed as inseparable personal devices, will evolve significantly as AI-driven robotics and automation expand across industrial and consumer ecosystems.

NVIDIA has entered into a multi-year partnership with Activate, a venture firm focused on AI and early-stage investments, to discover and support the next generation of AI startups in India.

This collaboration, announced at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, will merge NVIDIA’s global Inception startup programme with Activate’s approach to supporting founders before the formal establishment of a company.

As part of this partnership, startups backed by Activate will be integrated into NVIDIA’s global inception programme, which offers access to developer tools, technical training, computing resources, and support for market entry.

Salesforce has launched the India cohort of its global Accelerator — Agents for Impact, committing up to ₹6.8 crore in grants along with free technology access and pro bono expertise to help 4 Indian non-profits build custom agentic AI solutions over a 6-month programme.

The first India cohort includes Antarang Foundation, Foundation for Excellence, Latika, and Teach for India, each building a specialised AI agent ranging from career counselling and scholarship processing to legal navigation and teacher support, marking a structured push to embed Agentforce into grassroots social impact work.

"Nonprofits are drowning in admin work when they should be focused on transformation. AI agents represent a fundamental shift: technology that doesn't just optimise workflows but reclaims human capacity for what matters most," said Arundhati Bhattacharya, President & CEO, Salesforce, South Asia.

TCS has partnered with Cisco to launch a Center of Excellence (CoE) in TCS Synergy Park Campus in Hyderabad, focusing on Autonomous Enterprise Operations. The CoE is aimed at developing solutions that make AI real for customers, and the centre will act as an experience hub designed to enable customers to achieve higher levels of autonomy by following the TCS five-level Services Autonomy Model.

"The CoE will be a co-innovation platform for enterprises that will help them embrace autonomous IT operations with self-learning, self-action and self-governance capabilities. This hub will enable enterprises to accelerate their transition to Autonomous Operations through improved business agility and deliver measurable business impact," said V. Rajanna, President, Technology Software and Services, TCS.

"By combining Cisco’s AI-driven technology with TCS’ deep industry expertise, we are empowering our mutual customers to accelerate their journey toward autonomous operations and achieve unprecedented business agility," said Tim Coogan, Senior Vice President, Global Partner Sales, Cisco.

Microsoft plans to equip about 20 million Indians with the relevant AI skills by 2030.

“This year, we upscaled 5.6 million Indians, and so we actually doubled that commitment to 20 million people by the end of 2030,” Amanda Craig, General Manager, Responsible AI Public Policy at Microsoft, said in a panel discussion at India AI Impact Summit.

Craig also highlighted Microsoft’s five-pillar plan that focuses on covering infrastructure, skilling, and cultural capability that helped developing countries, and helped adjust actions based on data to make sure the impact is real. 

Tech Mahindra has launched an 8-billion-parameter Hindi-first education LLM under the IndiaAI Mission at the India AI Impact Summit in Delhi, becoming the only IT services company selected by the mission to build its own foundational LLM.

The new model is an advanced version of the company’s earlier 1.2-billion-parameter foundation model built under Project Indus.

The model has been developed in collaboration with NVIDIA and is powered by NVIDIA AI Enterprise. It uses the NVIDIA NeMo framework for training and NVIDIA NIM microservices for deployment to ensure scalability and production readiness.

AI firm Fractal Analytics launched the latest version of its healthcare-focused reasoning model, Vaidya 2.0, at the Delhi summit. 

The company said Vaidya 2.0 scored 50.1 on OpenAI’s HealthBench (hard) benchmark, becoming the first AI model to cross the 50-point mark on the evaluation framework. According to Fractal, the model outperformed GPT-5 and Gemini Pro 3 on the same benchmark.

Fractal said Vaidya 2.0 is the first in a series of verticalised foundation models it plans to build for healthcare and other sectors.

At the India AI Impact Summit, New Delhi, 2026, Emvo has launched voiceSHIELD, an open-source secure speech-to-text model designed to protect voice AI systems from malicious inputs in real time. 

“Real-time voice security requires fundamentally different architectural choices compared to text-based systems,” said Sumit Ranjan, CTO and Co-founder of Emvo. 

“voiceSHIELD was designed to deliver both speed and reliability, so enterprises can deploy voice AI with confidence while maintaining strong security controls.”

UAE-based technology group G42 and US AI chip firm Cerebras will deploy a national-scale artificial intelligence supercomputer in India. The computer will have 8 exaflops of computing power.

The system, announced on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, will be hosted in India and operate under local governance rules, with data remaining within the country.

The project will be delivered by G42 and Cerebras in partnership with the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

Nikhil Malhotra, Chief Innovation Officer at Tech Mahindra and the creator of Maker's Lab, talks to AIM about the 8-billion parameter education LLM

As India rushes to bring AI to over a billion people, the risks of cyberattacks are higher than ever. In this episode of AI Talk Show, we sit down with Paul Savill from Kyndryl to discuss their massive $2.25 billion investment in India and the launch of a new Cyber Defence Operations Center in Bangalore.

We break down what "last mile AI delivery" really means, why traditional security isn't enough for modern AI threats, and how Indian companies are preparing for a future where AI agents manage our data.

In a panel discussion at the India AI Impact Summit, Yann LeCun, ex-Chief AI Scientist at Meta, reiterated that the current AI technology is nowhere near human-level intelligence—not even cat-level intelligence. 

LeCun quit Meta late last year to build AMI Labs, a startup focused on building a 'world model'.

He said that Artificial General Intelligence, which he prefers to call 'Artificial Super Intelligence', will take time to develop. "There's no such thing as AGI. General intelligence is complete nonsense; there is only human-level AI," he added.

Yesterday, he said that the future AI innovation will come from India and Africa, which have favourable demographics.

In this incisive episode of Front Page, legendary investor and former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai breaks down the structural failures driving India’s top AI founders to San Francisco. 

While the government celebrates summits and "carnivals," Pai argues that "peanuts" in funding won't win a global war being fought with billions of dollars in the US and China.

He presses for an urgent look at why over 100 Indian AI founders have left for the Bay Area and how to bring the "next generation" back. "The country which has the top AI is the country that's going to dominate the planet."

NxtGen AI plans to deploy a national-scale sovereign AI factory in India, powered by 4,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and featuring data centre infrastructure from Vertiv.

The deployment uses Dell Integrated Rack Scalable Systems (IR5000) running on Dell PowerEdge XE9685L liquid-cooled servers. The facility is designed to support AI training and inference within India’s sovereign cloud framework.

Vertiv is providing the power and thermal infrastructure for the AI factory. The company’s scope includes distribution transformers, switchboards, uninterruptible power supply systems, room power distribution units, racks and rack power distribution units.

The Digital India BHASHINI Division under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology launched VoicERA, an open source end-to-end voice AI stack, at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, an expansion of India’s Digital Public Infrastructure. 

The platform has been deployed on the BHASHINI National Language Infrastructure and is positioned as a national execution layer for multilingual voice and language AI.

VoicERA is designed to be open, pluggable, interoperable, cloud deployable, and on-premises ready. The government said it will allow secure and scalable deployment of voice systems across departments, research institutions and innovation ecosystems. 

India has formally joined Pax Silica, the US-led effort on artificial intelligence and supply chain security, at the India AI Impact Summit.

Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the semiconductor industry will need an additional 1 million people to fuel its growth. For that, the government has provided students at 315 universities with free semiconductor tools from Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens.

Google CEO congratulated India and the US on signing the Pax Silica initiative, saying that it will strengthen the US-India tech partnership.

"Pax Silica focuses on making sure that the supply chains are safe and secure, and encourages greater commercial partnerships across key technologies," Pichai said.

He also said that Google is working in India across product, skilling, and infrastructure fronts.

India is set to sign the Pax Silica initiative today. This would mark India’s entry into the US-led alliance that is focused on building a secure and resilient supply chain for critical minerals and artificial intelligence.

The Pax Silica initiative seeks to promote stability and prosperity through joint efforts in the AI supply chain. It emphasises the need for reliable supply chains as indispensable to mutual economic security and recognises AI as a transformative force for long-term prosperity.

Countries including Australia, Greece, Israel, Japan, Qatar, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom have joined the initiative

Calling AI a “civilisational turning point”, PM Narendra Modi yesterday argued its impact would be faster and broader than any previous technological wave.

“The real question is not what AI can do, but what humanity chooses to do with AI,” he said as he unveiled India’s MANAV Vision—a framework centred on human-centric, accountable and nationally transformative deployment of the technology.

Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron invited India to join France’s push to restrict children’s access to harmful social media content.

Also, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani announced a ₹10 lakh crore investment over a period of seven years to build AI infrastructure across India.

Tata Sons Chairperson N Chandrasekaran followed with plans for a partnership with OpenAI to build India’s first large-scale AI-optimised data centre.

OpenAI’s Sam Altman offered a more provocative outlook, predicting that by 2028, more intelligence would reside in data centres than outside them.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in a fireside conversation with Infosys Co-Founder Nandan Nilekani, offered a bullish assessment of India’s prospects.

Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang confirmed that Meta would release new models in the coming months, deeply integrated into its products.