India AI Impact Summit Day 3 Live Updates

The third day of the India AI Impact Summit grabbed global headlines for all the wrong reasons. Galgotias University, from Greater Noida, was kicked out of the India AI Impact Expo pavilion for causing national embarrassment over the Chinese robodog that it claimed as its own. Its faculty was left combating media questions and issuing sloppy explanations over the debacle.

However, Day 3 was much more than just about plagiarism.

Google announced the India-America Connect Initiative, which will deliver new sub-sea cable routes to increase AI connectivity between India and the US.

Yotta Data Services announced that it will deploy 20,736 liquid-cooled NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs to form one of Asia’s largest AI superclusters.

Qualcomm will invest up to $150 million in India through a new Strategic AI Venture Fund.

Sarvam AI launched two new large language models, a 30-billion-parameter model and a 105-billion-parameter model, trained specifically to meet India's diverse AI needs. Then there were launches by Gnani.ai and other startups that unveiled multi-billion parameter multimodal foundational models.

But it's Day 4 when this AI orchestra is expected to reach its crescendo. Tomorrow Big Tech titans are going to descend on the summit, with the likes of Bill Gates, Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai, Alexandr Wang, Julie Sweet, Brad Smith, Nandan Nilekani, and many more set to look into the crystal ball and forecast what an AI future holds.

Stay tuned and watch this space for all the updates.

The IndiaAI Impact Summit 2026 has officially entered the Guinness World Records for the highest number of student pledges for responsible AI use within 24 hours.

Guinness World Records Adjudicator Pravin Patel announced that a total of 2,50,946 pledges were received during the summit, far exceeding the original goal.

Google DeepMind, Google Research and Google.org are partnering with the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) to facilitate the adoption of AI models to advance science, the company said in a blogpost.

This includes providing access to its frontier AI for Science models and powering innovation hubs with GenAI assistants, among other projects. 

Galgotias University apologised for the confusion created at the AI Impact Summit, stating that the person “manning the pavilion was ill-informed”.

“She was not aware of the technical origins of the products and in her enthusiasm of being on camera, gave factually incorrect information even though she was not authorised to speak to the press,” the university said in a statement.

It added that there was no institutional intent to misrepresent the innovation.

India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology launched the “AI Impact Startup Book” at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, a first-of-its-kind compendium that maps the scale, diversity and global reach of the country’s AI and deep tech startup ecosystem.

“The compendium provides a consolidated repository of AI solutions being developed in India, enabling ministries, states and institutions to assess maturity, understand real-world performance and adopt them for population-scale deployment,” Abhishek Singh, Director General of the National Informatics Centre (NIC), Additional Secretary at MeitY and CEO of India AI, said.

At Google's panel discussion at India AI Impact summit, James Manyika, SVP of Research, Labs, Technology & Society; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet; Demis Hassabis, Co-founder & CEO of Google DeepMind; and Debjani Ghosh, Distinguished Fellow at NITI Aayog discussed the America India Connect initiative, for delivering sub-sea cable routes for better AI connectivity between India and the US.

"Today, we are announcing the India-America Connect Initiative, which will deliver new sub-sea cable routes to increase AI connectivity between India and the US and multiple locations across the southern hemisphere," Pichai said. "For the opportunities this initiative creates, we should also invest in skilling, which is why we are announcing our most ambitious skilling programs here."

In a demo at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Sarvam showcased Vikram, a multilingual AI chatbot which can converse in Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, and other Indian languages. This is also going to be available for phones.

At Google's panel discussion at India AI Impact summit, Demis Hassabis, Co-founder & CEO of Google DeepMind, said that more than 3 million researchers worldwide are now using AlphaFold, calling it a breakthrough moment for science powered by AI. He expressed pride in how AlphaFold has accelerated biological discovery and opened up access to protein structure data globally.

He added that India is well-positioned to leverage AlphaFold’s capabilities across research institutions, biotech startups and academic labs.

Hassabis also noted that the latest AI tools are being adopted across industries, including Bollywood, which is experimenting with cutting-edge generative technologies.

DeepMind has partnered with the Government to expand AI-driven research and infrastructure efforts.

Gurugram-based startup Shunya Labs has launched Vāķ, an open-weight, real-time voice translation model that supports 55 Indian languages across 2,970 translation pairs. The model was unveiled in partnership with Nasscom at the India AI Impact Summit 2026.

Vāķ enables ‘any-to-any’ speech translation across Indian languages, with end-to-end latency under 1.5 seconds.

Sourav Bandyopadhyay, Founder and Chief Scientist of Shunya Labs, said the company’s goal is to reduce India’s reliance on foreign voice AI systems.

SquadStack.ai is collaborating with NVIDIA to accelerate the development of Conversational Superintelligence, a next-generation enterprise voice AI system designed to operate with contextual intelligence and judgement.

The partnership brings together SquadStack.ai’s production-grade voice AI platform and proprietary interaction intelligence with NVIDIA’s accelerated AI infrastructure stack, the company stated.

SquadStack.ai will tap NVIDIA Nemotron models to enable low-latency, high-throughput inference required for real-time enterprise deployments.

Peak XV Partners has announced investments in five early-stage AI companies during the Impact AI PitchFest at the India AI Impact Summit.

The five selected companies are Round1.ai, Kello, Companion Labs, Zoop, and Memfold AI.

With the ₹120 crore ($13.23 million) funding, the VC firm aims to support AI products that guide decisions and integrate into workflows across employment, sales, and collaboration. 

OpenAI has announced it is collaborating with IIT Delhi, IIM Ahmedabad, AIIMS New Delhi, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (UPES) and Pearl Academy.

The initiative will help these institutes integrate campus-wide access to OpenAI’s products and embed AI fluency across various academic workflows for students, faculty, and staff.

Yotta has announced that it will deploy 20,736 liquid-cooled NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs to form one of Asia’s largest AI superclusters, backed by an investment exceeding $2 billion, with deployment expected to go live by August 2026. 

The supercluster will be housed at Yotta’s 60 MW D2 data centre in Greater Noida, scalable to 250 MW, with additional capacity from its Navi Mumbai campus.

“From not having any GPUs to [having] enough compute available [with] India announcing so many sovereign models, it’s a very satisfying feeling when I say that these models have all been trained on [our] compute infrastructure," Sunil Gupta, Co-founder, Managing Director and CEO of Yotta Data Services, told AIM at the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the AI Impact Summit.

They discussed the work India is doing in AI and how Google is contributing in the country's mission to infuse AI at all levels to improve health, agriculture, and expand access to information in all languages.

The Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe) has launched the AI INSPIRED Opportunities in the space sector programme with an outlay of up to ₹6 crore to back AI-led innovation in India’s private space ecosystem.

Up to six startups and MSMEs will receive grants of up to ₹1 crore each under the IN-SPACe Seed Fund Scheme, across tracks including Edge Intelligence in Orbit, Space for Earth Intelligence and Smart Access to Space.

Speaking on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit 2026, Sumeet Mathur, Senior Vice President and Managing Director of ServiceNow’s India Technology and Business Centre, dismissed the recent global SaaS stock selloff as an “overreaction”, even as its own shares fell 11% on January 29.

“Capital markets do what capital markets do. Personally, I think it’s an overreaction,” he says. “AI is a new technology. It will take time for people to parse out which companies are truly adding value and which business models may get cannibalised.”

Sarvam AI has unveiled Sarvam 105B, describing it as the company’s sovereign foundational AI model.

Speaking at the summit, Sarvam AI Co-Founder Pratyush Kumar said the new model outperforms DeepSeek R1.

Along with this, the company has also launched Sarvam 30B, which is an open source model.

The India AI Impact Summit 2026 will now continue for an additional day, running through Saturday, 21 February 2026, after drawing an “overwhelming response,” IT Secretary S. Krishnan said.

The timing for the expo have been extended till 8 pm.

Despite this, the summit will remain closed for public on Thursday, February 19, due to restricted events. It will reopen for the public again on February 20.

The conversations on day 3 of the India AI Impact Summit have been largely overarching.

Google DeepMind Founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said current models have shown difficulties in devising long-term plans. He acknowledged that Artificial General Intelligence isn't here yet. Meanwhile, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said AI is entering “its next chapter,” in which intelligence runs directly on the devices and systems people use every day.

Then, there's the entire Galgotias University saga. The university was asked to vacate the India AI Impact Expo arena for claiming to develop a robodog, which was actually purchased from the Chinese startup Unitree Robotics. Now, its representatives at the India AI Impact Summit are facing heat from the media.

That's it from me, for now. It has been a long morning, but an exciting one! Handing the live blog over to our senior technology reporter, Mohit Pandey.

At the India Impact Summit, Microsoft today announced it is on pace to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to help bring AI to countries across the Global South. Last year, Microsoft unveiled $17.5 billion ‌worth of AI ​investments in ​India.

"For more than a century, unequal access to electricity exacerbated a growing economic gap between the Global North and South. Unless we act with urgency, a growing AI divide will perpetuate this disparity in the century ahead," Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President of Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

Microsoft also launched the Elevate for Educators programme in India to train the teaching workforce for an AI-driven future.

IT and Electronics Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw yesterday inaugurated the WAVES Creators’ Corner.

Conceptualised as a fully operational, hands-on innovation workspace, the pavilion is designed to demonstrate the transformative applications of artificial intelligence within the AVGC-XR (Animation, VFX, Gaming, Comics, and Extended Reality) ecosystem. 

At the India AI Impact Summit, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said AI is entering “its next chapter,” in which intelligence runs directly on the devices and systems people use every day. 

Qualcomm will invest up to $150 million in India through a new Strategic AI Venture Fund.

The company said the fund aims to support India’s expanding AI startup ecosystem. It will focus on edge AI and technologies with industry use.

Sunil Gupta, Co-founder, MD, and CEO of Yotta Data Services, talked to AIM about the AI infrastructure firm's expanded partnership with NVIDIA.

Yotta is bringing in 21,000 B300 liquid-cooled GPUs. This new cluster will be among the largest superclusters of B300 in the entire APAC region.

A significant portion of this capacity will serve the India AI mission and Indian startups.

Yotta Data Services will build one of Asia's largest AI computing hubs using NVIDIA's latest Blackwell Ultra chips. The project will cost over $2 billion and will feature a four-year engagement with NVIDIA worth over $1 billion.

The engagement will involve NVIDIA establishing one of Asia-Pacific's largest DGX Cloud clusters within Yotta's infrastructure.

According to a Reuters report, the supercluster will be deployed at Yotta's data centre campus near Delhi.

Shaligram Dewangan, Founder of Kritdhi, and an AI researcher at IIT Guwahati, announced the model, called Dhi-5B, describing it as a compute-optimal system pre-trained from scratch in India. The base version of the model has four billion parameters and was trained on over 40 billion natural language tokens.

The multimodal language model was trained on a budget of ₹1.1 lakh (~$1,200) and across five stages.

The company is also presenting this model at the India AI Impact Summit.

Our reporters on the ground confirm that Galgotias University has been asked to vacate the India AI Impact Expo arena immediately.

The development comes after the university faced backlash for displaying a robodog from Chinese startup Unitree Robotics and claiming that it built it on its own.

Later, the institution clarified that it did not build the robodog, and that the goal is to give its students exposure to cutting-edge technologies.

Qualcomm has announced its intention to invest up to $150 million to support India's AI startup ecosystem.

The investments will be deployed through Qualcomm Ventures, with a focus on automotive, IoT, robotics, and mobile startups.

Ganesh Gopalan, CEO and Co-founder at Gnani.ai, talked to AIM at the India AI Impact Summit about the Inya VoiceOS, India's first five-billion-parameter voice-to-voice AI model. He said the model can fundamentally change human-machine communication.

CoRover.ai, the creator of BharatGPT, has announced large-scale deployment of its multilingual AI platform powered by NVIDIA Nemotron Speech open models and libraries, alongside the launch of a new offline AI device called the BharatGPT DeskAI Appliance built on NVIDIA’s Grace Blackwell architecture, called Astra EdgeAI X.

After Galgotias University faced backlash on social media for presenting Unitree Robotics' robodogs as its own, the Greater Noida institution has issued a clarification. It stated that the goal is to give its students exposure to cutting-edge technologies.

“Galgotias has not built this robodog, neither have we claimed,” the statement read. 

At the India AI Impact Summit, Google DeepMind founder and CEO Demis Hassabis said current models have shown difficulties in devising long-term plans.

"They can plan over the short term, but over longer term, as the way that we plan over years, they don't really have that capability at the moment," he remarked.

While he acknowledged that Artificial General Intelligence isn't here yet, it's certainly on the horizon

Delhi-based deep tech startup Shodh AI announced Project Skanda, which it describes as India’s first sovereign generative AI model for material science. It was developed in collaboration with NVIDIA under the IndiaAI Mission.

“Shodh AI isn’t just building another chatbot; we are building the ‘brain’ that will design the physical future of India’s energy sector,” Arastu Sharma, Founder and CEO of Shodh AI, tells AIM.

Jensen Huang's visit during the India AI Impact Summit was cancelled at the last minute. However, that didn’t dampen the company’s spirits as it announced partnerships with Yotta, L&T, E2E Networks, major manufacturers, and IT firms.

These collaborations aim to build AI factories, scale data centres with tens of thousands of GPUs and deploy AI agents across sectors including healthcare, telecom, and manufacturing. 

At a press briefing, Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director for South Asia at NVIDIA, responded to AIM's question on whether AI-driven robotics will augment roles rather than replace them. 

Day 2 of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 was far less chaotic than the inaugural day, when several attendees expressed on social media that they faced issues when it came to registrations, internet access, online payments, and crowd control. Even Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, had to issue an apology.

The second day of the summit was heavy on announcements and launches. BharatGen launched several sovereign AI models. Gnani.ai unveiled Inya VoiceOS, a voice-to-voice foundational model. Meanwhile, Qualcomm introduced its Robotics System and Dragonwing IQ-10 processor for humanoids

There was also a slew of announcements from the government. Vaishnaw announced that an additional 20,000 GPUs will be added in the coming weeks. He also outlined plans for what he termed an “AI version of UPI.”

Hello readers! I'm Kanishk Singh, Associate Editor at AIM, and bracing myself for Day 3 of the India AI Impact Summit. The schedule, though not as packed as what's to come on February 19, when Big Tech titans will descend on Bharat Mandapam, Delhi for a marathon, day-long AI jamboree, Day 3 still has a lot to offer.

There will be sessions on physical AI and robotics, autonomous banking, how Google is using full-stack AI, quantum technologies, and, of course, numerous discussions on ethical and responsible AI practices—which seems to be the overarching theme of the five-day summit, judging by the calendar.

Stay tuned for all the live updates here, and our team will do our best to keep you abreast with the latest developments at the summit.