New Delhi to host India-AI Impact Summit 2026 on February 19-20

New Delhi, Sep 18 (PTI) New Delhi will host the India-AI Impact Summit 2026 on February 19-20, a mega event that will be inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and will bring global leaders, innovators, policymakers, and the industry together to shape a collective vision for Artificial Intelligence.

India-AI Impact Summit 2026 is crucial in the current context as it comes at a time when nations are racing to harness AI’s transformative potential for economic growth, and innovation, amid a growing consensus on the need for safe and ethical AI frameworks, as well as governance frameworks.

The AI Impact Summit in New Delhi that would chart discourse around measurable impact of AI, also highlights the country's role as a convener for the Global South and beyond. It will showcase the transformative role of AI in enabling inclusive development, sustainability, fostering equitable progress, and will look to shape a shared vision for AI.

"In February, India will be hosting the AI Impact Summit. It is a great honour for our country. After the summits in the UK, South Korea, and France, the next Summit will be held in India," IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said, adding that many nations and global leaders will be participating in the event.

The government on Thursday also announced that eight new entities have been selected to build foundational models, marking a significant stride in India's AI leadership ambitions, the blueprint of which involves indigenous LLMs, skilling, and helping drive a consensus on a global AI governance framework.

Under the IndiaAI Foundation Models pillar, eight projects were launched on Thursday, all designed to build indigenous AI models trained on India-specific data.

Selected from about 506 proposals, these initiatives span multilingual and domain-specific models, scientific discovery, healthcare, and industrial innovation, among others.

The list of entities that have been selected include Avatar AI for creating specialised 'AI Avatars' optimised for Indian languages and domains such as agriculture, healthcare, and governance, and IIT Bombay Consortium Bharat Gen for developing multilingual and multimodal models with an open-source approach to support applications in agriculture, finance, legal, health, and education.

Fractal Analytics will build India’s first large reasoning model designed for structured reasoning, STEM disciplines, and medical problem-solving. Tech Mahindra Maker’s Lab will design model for Indic languages (with a focus on Hindi dialects), alongside an agentic AI platform, Orion, for government applications.

Zenteiq is developing BrahmAI, a science-driven multimodal foundation model to advance engineering intelligence, scientific computing, and industrial innovation, while another entity GenLoop will be creating small language models to support all 22 scheduled Indian languages with native reasoning and content moderation.

Intellihealth is proposing a model to enable early screening of neurological disorders and advance brain–computer interface research, and Shodh AI is developing a model for material discovery, integrating AI into experimental workflows to accelerate innovation in material sciences.

Further, 30 Data and AILabs have been launched pan-India, forming the first wave of a 570-lab network.

The first 27 labs are in partnership with NIELIT, established across key Tier 2 & 3 cities, and three labs are set up in Mokokchung, Mhow, and Mohali with Intel. These labs will deliver foundational AI and data training courses under the FutureSkills initiative of the IndiaAI Mission.

"Delivered through the Data and AI Labs network, new foundational courses aim to equip learners to participate in the AI economy by offering entry-level training in data annotation (images, text, audio) and data curation (organising and labeling datasets)," an official release said.

Also, IndiaAI Fellowship Program has been expanded to support 13,500 scholars, covering 8,000 undergraduates, 5,000 postgraduates, and 500 PhD researchers from all disciplines.

This brings the IndiaAI Fellowship at par with PM Research Fellowships, the release said adding these fellowships are now open to students from diverse disciplines across engineering, medicine, law, commerce, business, and liberal arts. PTI MBI NB NB