India AI Summit: Headlines and Headaches

Sector6  Feb 18, 2026 The bi-weekly newsletter by AIM that brings the biggest shifts shaping IT, AI, and GCCs. India AI Summit: Headlines and Headaches Day 3 of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 opened on a calmer note, following the logistical chaos of Day 1 and the relatively smoother Day 2. By Mohit Pandey Attendees complained about registration delays, patchy internet and the notable absence of UPI, prompting Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw to apologise publicly.  By Tuesday, operations were smoother. Tighter crowd control, fewer bottlenecks and the focus shifted back to what the ecosystem had gathered for in the first place: model launches, infrastructure promises and a renewed push for sovereign AI. Having said that… The headline announcements came from BharatGen and Gnani.ai, both unveiling foundational models aimed at reducing India's reliance on foreign AI stacks. BharatGen rolled out a suite of sovereign models spanning speech, language and document intelligence. Shrutam is an LLM-based automatic speech recognition system. Sooktam handles text-to-speech. Patram is a vision-language model built for document understanding. Together, they signal a coordinated attempt to build an Indian stack across modalities rather than a single showcase model. If BharatGen focused on breadth, Gnani.ai went deep on voice. The startup unveiled Inya VoiceOS, described as India's first five-billion-parameter voice-to-voice foundational model. Unlike traditional systems that convert speech to text and back again, Inya operates directly in acoustic and semantic space.  Moreover, Sarvam has also announced its 30-billion and 105-billion-parameter models at the summit today. On the hardware and robotics side, Qualcomm announced its Robotics System and Dragonwing IQ10 processor aimed at humanoids and advanced autonomous mobile robots.  In parallel, Qualcomm committed up to $150 million through Qualcomm Ventures to back Indian AI startups across automotive, IoT, robotics and mobile. AIM Network Exclusive >> Is India at risk of becoming an 'AI Colony'? In this incisive episode of Front Page, veteran investor and former Infosys CFO Mohandas Pai discusses why many of India's top AI founders are moving to San Francisco. He argues that while the government celebrates summits and 'carnivals', small funding pools cannot match the billions of dollars being deployed in the US and China. Developers, Alert! AMD AI Engage is Here >> Join AMD AI Engage, an AMD-led initiative for developers and AI enthusiasts. Strengthen your AI skills, participate in challenges, and unlock opportunities for advanced certification experiences with AMD and industry experts. Register now. A Lot of Sovereignty NVIDIA's presence loomed large even though CEO Jensen Huang cancelled his visit. The company announced partnerships with Yotta, L&T, E2E Networks and major manufacturers to build AI factories and scale data centres with tens of thousands of GPUs.  CoRover.ai has also unveiled a Blackwell-powered BharatGPT Mini device, the BharatGPT DeskAI Appliance, built on NVIDIA's Grace Blackwell architecture. Sovereign AI was not limited to language. Delhi-based Shodh AI launched Project Skanda, which it calls India's first sovereign generative AI model for material science. Developed in collaboration with NVIDIA under the IndiaAI Mission, the model aims to accelerate research in energy and advanced materials.  Meanwhile, a student-led effort drew attention for its frugality. Shaligram Dewangan, Founder of Kritdhi and an AI researcher at IIT Guwahati, announced Dhi-5B, a compute-optimal model pretrained from scratch in India. The government used the summit to double down on infrastructure. Vaishnaw announced that 20,000 additional GPUs will be added in the coming weeks, calling it the next phase of India's AI strategy.  He also outlined plans for what he termed an 'AI version of UPI', a digital public infrastructure layer that would allow developers, and even other countries, to build on India's AI stack.  Of the projected $200 billion AI investment pipeline, most is expected to go into infrastructure, with about $17 billion earmarked for deep tech and application layer innovation. However, not everything was celebratory. Galgotias University was forced to vacate the expo arena after backlash over the institute presenting a robodog from Chinese startup Unitree Robotics as its own. Later, in a clarification, the university stated, "Galgotias has not built this robodog, nor have we claimed." By the way, the summit will now continue for an additional day, running through Saturday, 21 February, after drawing an "overwhelming response," MeitY Secretary S Krishnan said. Overall, the summit remains in full swing with a steady stream of sovereignty-focused announcements, despite a few hiccups along the way. AI is No Longer a Tool at Xebia, it is the Operating System Over the last 18 months, Xebia has shifted from experimenting with AI to operationalising it across delivery teams and support functions. Today, almost every step of the software lifecycle includes AI assistance. The company has rolled out an enterprise generative AI stack built around Anthropic's Claude and positioned itself as an authorised reseller capable of deploying the model within a client's own cloud. Click here to find out more. Best Firm for Data Scientists – Showcase your leadership in data science and build a thriving workplace. 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