All the important news from the ongoing India AI Impact Summit

To attract more AI investment into the country, India is hosting a four-day AI Impact Summit this week, bringing together executives from major AI labs and Big Tech, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare, as well as heads of state.

The event, which is expected to draw 250,000 visitors, includes appearances from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to deliver a speech alongside French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday.

Here are the key updates from the summit:

• India earmarks $1.1 billion for its state-backed venture capital fund. The fund will invest in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing startups nationwide.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said India accounts for more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, second only to the U.S. He also said Indians represent the largest group of students using ChatGPT.

• Blackstone has acquired a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity fundraise. Teachers’ Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners also participated. The company plans to raise another $600 million in debt and deploy more than 20,000 GPUs.

• Bengaluru-based C2i, which is developing a power solution for data centres, raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Peak XV, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures.

• HCL CEO Vineet Nayyar said Indian IT companies will focus on profitability rather than being job creators. The comments come as Indian IT stocks dip amid rising fears that AI could disrupt the IT services sector.

• Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said industries like IT services and BPOs (Business Process Outsourcing) could “almost completely disappear” within five years because of AI. He told Hindustan Times that 250 million young people in India should be selling AI-based products and services to the rest of the world.

• AMD is partnering with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to build rack-scale AI infrastructure based on AMD’s “Helios” platform.

• Anthropic announced it is opening its first office in India, located in Bengaluru. The company said India is its second-largest user base for Claude, after the U.S.

• Anthropic is partnering with Infosys to deploy Claude models and tools like Claude Code to Indian enterprises. Initially, the companies will deploy AI tools in the telecommunications sector through a dedicated Anthropic Centre of Excellence.

• Indian AI company Sarvam previewed its upcoming smart glasses under the name Sarvam Kaze. The company has also released several models in recent weeks, including a dubbing model, a speech-to-text model, a text-to-speech model, and an OCR-focused vision model.

• Indian conglomerate Adani said it is allocating $100 billion to build renewable-energy-powered AI data centres in India by 2035. The company said this investment could also catalyse another $150 billion in areas such as server manufacturing, advanced electrical infrastructure, sovereign cloud platforms, and related industries.

• Voice AI company Cartesia is partnering with India-based orchestrator Blue Machines to deploy voice solutions for enterprises while supporting local data residency requirements.

• Cohere Labs launched a family of multilingual models with open weights supporting more than 70 languages. The company said the models can run locally on devices and that it has released versions tuned for specific regions.

• OpenAI said it will open two new offices in India, in Bengaluru and Mumbai.

• OpenAI also partnered with the Tata Group to deploy 100 megawatts of compute capacity in India, with a plan to scale it up to 1 gigawatt.

• India’s tech minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said the country aims to attract more than $200 billion in investment for AI infrastructure over the next two years.

• India’s vibe-coding startup Emergent said it has reached $100 in ARR and launched a mobile app.

• Indian AI startup Sarvam released two new open-source models: Sarvam 30B and Sarvam 105B.

• Sarvam also announced a partnership with Qualcomm, HMD, and Bosch to deploy its AI models to devices including smartphones, feature phones, cars, laptops, and smart glasses.

• Voice AI startup Gnani released a zero-shot voice cloning text-to-speech model called Vachana, supporting 12 languages.

• BharatGen, a government-backed AI consortium, launched a 17 billion parameter model called Param 2 that supports 22 languages.

• Streaming platform JioHotstar said it will use ChatGPT to improve content discovery through conversational search.