Opinion | India AI Summit: Global South’s AI Voice Finds Its Microphone In Delhi

Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra

By chairing this summit, India staked credibility on a different premise: the countries with the most to gain or lose from AI are the ones most qualified to shape where it goes.

Britain picked Bletchley Park for the first global AI safety summit in November 2023. The choice was deliberate. This was where Alan Turing cracked Nazi codes during World War II, a venue dripping with Western technological symbolism. Seoul hosted the next round in May 2024. Paris followed in February 2025. The pattern was clear: rules for artificial intelligence were getting written in capitals that had money, infrastructure, and political clout. Everyone else got to watch from the sidelines.

That script flipped this week. On 16 February, the AI Impact Summit opened at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, marking the first time one of these gatherings landed anywhere in the developing world. Over five days, more than 20 heads of state, 60 ministers, and a parade of Silicon Valley executives, from Sundar Pichai of Alphabet to Dario Amodei from Anthropic, showed up to argue about who should govern AI, who benefits from it, and who decides. The location was the whole point.

Opinion | Chinar Open Winter Games: Blending Sport Push With Anti-Drug Drive

Opinion | Congress At War With Itself: The Growing Revolt Against Rahul Gandhi

Opinion | Great Nicobar And India's Indo-Pacific Maritime Geometry

Opinion | Bofors To Rafale: Has PM Modi Successfully Ended The Scam Veto On Defence Procurement?

India did not stumble into this role. The country joined the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence in 2020 as a founding member. Two years later, it won the Council Chair with over two-thirds of first preference votes and served as Lead Chair through 2024. During that presidency, Indian diplomats kept pushing one line: bring in the Global South. At the time, only a handful of developing countries sat at the GPAI table. India then co-chaired the Paris AI Action Summit in February 2025, where Modi announced Delhi would host the next edition. This was planned, not improvised.

India also brought substance. Its Digital Public Infrastructure stack runs identity and payment systems for over a billion people at costs that make Silicon Valley execs go dizzy. The country’s linguistic diversity – with hundreds of languages and dialects – used to be treated as a problem. Now it looks like an asset. Building AI that works across that many tongues is harder than optimising for English speakers, and India worked out those problems in public. The IndiaAI Mission, approved by the Cabinet in March 2024 with over Rs 10,300 crore spread across five years, put money behind compute infrastructure, data governance, and AI research centres. Small countries do not write cheques like that.

Even the summit’s name shifted. Bletchley Park called itself an AI Safety Summit, focused on existential risks and runaway models, the kind of anxieties that preoccupy rich democracies. By the time it reached Delhi, the branding had changed to AI Impact Summit. That switch was not cosmetic. It reflected what governments in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia have been saying for years: the real danger is not a sci-fi doomsday scenario. It is getting shut out of the technology completely – something which the Global South is at a persistent risk of.

India has been saying this out loud. The summit organised around three pillars, People, Planet, and Progress, and ran seven thematic working groups on topics like democratisation of AI resources, inclusion for social empowerment, and trusted AI frameworks. The underlying argument was consistent: when computing power and foundational models concentrate in a few Western corporations and governments, that creates a different kind of risk. Some analysts call it AI colonialism.

The concern is structural, not rhetorical. Data centres and the specialised chips that train large AI models sit overwhelmingly in the United States, with some presence in China and Europe. India approved $18 billion in semiconductor projects to build domestic capacity, but those plants are years away from production. For most of the developing world, depending on foreign infrastructure is not a choice. It is reality. Changing that means building the kind of shared compute frameworks and open access AI commons that India wants on the summit agenda.

But hosting a summit and actually shaping outcomes are different things. India’s technology credentials are solid. Its regulatory track record is shakier. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act passed in August 2023, but phased implementation only began in November 2025, with full compliance not required until May 2027. If India wants to lead on trustworthy AI globally, it needs to show it can govern technology coherently at home. India’s AI literacy and infrastructure gap between Bangalore and rural Bihar is enormous. The summit’s Sanskrit tagline, Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya, welfare and happiness for all, sounds good. Getting AI access to a farmer in Odisha or a student in rural Rajasthan is harder.

This week’s summit doubled as a trade fair. Tech executives came for the geopolitics, but also for the market: 1.4 billion people, young, digitally connected, one of the last big untapped opportunities for AI products. Microsoft committed $17.5 billion to expand AI infrastructure in India. Anthropic hired a former Microsoft India managing director to run local operations. OpenAI set up a dedicated India sales division.

None of that changes what happened in Delhi this week. Holding the summit here was its own argument, staged in real time against the idea that conversations about transformative technology must start in London or San Francisco and then spread outward. That assumption has caused real damage. It produces frameworks built for rich-country problems while ignoring what poor countries actually face. By chairing this summit, India staked credibility on a different premise: the countries with the most to gain or lose from AI are the ones most qualified to shape where it goes.

The test comes next. The Leaders’ Declaration that closes the summit on February 20 will either contain something that matters or it will be another round of diplomatic platitudes. India earned the microphone this week. What it says next, and what it actually delivers after the cameras leave, will decide whether the Global South’s voice in AI governance sticks around.

© News18