New Delhi: If the opening day of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 was defined by organizational hiccups and empty aisles, the second day was dominated by a flurry of investment announcements that reframed the event as a high-capitalization story — even as disappointment persisted among exhibitors over the quality of the pitches.
Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said India’s private startups plan to invest $200 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure over the next two years, along with $17 billion in deep technology funding, driven by interest from global investors and companies attending the summit.
“As we move forward, the world’s confidence in India will grow. Big technology firms look to India as a trusted destination for tech solutions and tech innovation,” Vaishnaw said.
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Venture funds, major semiconductors and domestic conglomerates followed with new commitments, signaling that investor appetite for India’s AI ambitions remains strong.
For example, the India Deep-Tech Alliance (IDTA), a group of private venture capital firms and technology companies formed in November, on Tuesday raised its net capital to $2.5 billion, of which the group pledged to invest $1 billion in Indian AI startups over the next three years.
IDTA counts Accel, Blume Ventures, Premji Invest and Nvidia among its members and has added US semiconductor firms Applied Materials, Lam Research and Micron to the group, as well as domestic conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (:&T) and energy firm CG Power.
Further at the Impact AI PitchFest held as part of the Summit, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India) announced investments ₹120 million ($13 million) in five early-stage AI companies that won the competition, namely Companion Labs, Kello, Memfold AI, Round1 and Zoop. Peak XV did not disclose individual allocations.
Meanwhile, 16 Indian Venture and Alternate Capital Association (IVCA) member funds – including Accel, Chiratae Ventures and Prosus – mobilized collectively. ₹500 million ($55 million) in venture capital commitments for Indian AI startups at the same event.
A senior government official, speaking on the sidelines of the summit, said the investments were announced organically and “not as part of a consolidated effort to draw investment during the summit”.
Investors hopeful
Investors took an optimistic tone. Rajan Anandan, chief executive of Peak XV, said in a statement that “India’s AI opportunity will not be defined by who builds the biggest models, but by who builds products that work at population scale.”
“With over 900 million Indians online, the real opportunity lies in solving real needs, helping people find jobs, increase income and build businesses with AI. This focus on meeting the real needs of Indian users and building products at population scale will define India’s leadership in AI,” said Anandan.
In an interview with MintVinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and an early-stage investor in OpenAI, said such investments could become a cornerstone of India’s investment ecosystem.
“Private investors need to approach grassroots AI projects from a philanthropic lens, and developing AI social use cases in health and education will provide India with a baseload of technology to take to the rest of the world. These investments will help Indian startups build their products and amplify what AI can really do,” Khosla said.
More arrivals
In terms of investment, the government is focusing on five layers of AI – applications, models, semiconductors, infrastructure and energy, Vaishnaw said.
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“We expect an additional 20,000 GPUs (graphics processing units) on top of the 38,000 GPUs we already have in the compute layer,” the minister said. “We will place orders for another 20,000 GPUs in a week and they will be deployed over the next six months.”
As a component ₹10,372 crore spend on India’s AI mission, government subsidizes computing costs startups to use GPUs to build their AI models. There are 12 organizations currently receiving support for the development of indigenous core models or large language models.
Vaishnaw said AI Mission 2.0 will focus on creating a suite of trusted solutions that are safe, secure and tested. These will be offered as a public good or common code for the world to use and build on, similar to the UPI model, the minister said.
Conflict resolution between AI companies and content creators, Vaishnaw said the government sincerely believes news creators and conventional media must get “fair value” for their content used to train AI models.
He mentioned that the government is in dialogue with the big platforms that have shown an inclination towards the process of “fair distribution of income”.
Organizational deficiencies
Despite investment optimism, the Summit’s AI exhibition drew voices of disappointment as it failed to live up to the expectations of more than 600 startups and 300 exhibitors at the venue.
India’s artificial intelligence fair went without an audience on its first day on Monday as organizational issues left them stranded.
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It attracted about 125,000 visitors on the second day, according to Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary, Meita (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology), who addressed a press conference.
However, exhibitors have said that opening the fair to all visitors has led to disappointing audiences, with stalls costing up to ₹50 lakhs for five days, but for the most part it did not result in investors and global companies visiting them.