India’s AI Impact Summit and the Global South’s Aspiration in Shaping AI

India hosted one of the world’s biggest artificial intelligence summits in February. The India AI Impact Summit-2026 brought together heads of state, technology leaders, researchers, and policymakers in New Delhi to declare a “shared roadmap for global AI governance and collaboration”. With participation from over 110 countries, and hundreds of sessions, the summit was designed to signal something more than scale. It was meant to mark India’s role not just as a user of AI, but as a country seeking to shape and take an active role in its direction. India is demanding a role in shaping how AI is built, governed, and deployed. But the summit ultimately revealed a deeper reality. While the Global South is demanding a role in shaping AI, it still lacks the capacity to build, manage and control the technologies that define it.

The Summit Agenda

The India AI Summit was the fourth summit in the global AI Summit series. Previous summits were held in the United Kingdom, Seoul, and Paris. Spread over more than 500 events and multiple venues, the summit was structured around three guiding principles: People, Planet, and Progress. It was supported by thematic working groups addressing economic growth, inclusion, infrastructure, and governance.

The emphasis throughout was clear. AI was not framed as a distant technological frontier, but as an immediate tool for economic transformation and development. Global technology firms also pledged major investments, including billions toward AI infrastructure and deployment in lower-income markets. In this sense, the summit’s agenda did more than showcase possibilities. This focus on deployment over innovation was intentional. It reflected the structural position of countries like India in the global AI ecosystem.

Ambition Without Full Control

Although having one of the world’s largest IT talent pools, India did not present itself as a direct competitor to the world’s leading AI labs. Instead, it emphasized scale, deployment, and public infrastructure as sources of influence. In a country where digital systems operate across hundreds of millions of people, integrating AI into governance, finance, and welfare can shape how the technology is experienced in everyday life. This creates a different kind of leverage. Rather than competing at the frontier, countries like India are attempting to take a role in how AI is applied at scale. That may influence global norms and priorities, even if they are not building the most advanced large language models or manufacturing advanced microchips themselves. In this sense, the demand is not just for access to AI, but for relevance and representation.

Yet the summit also made clear that ambition alone does not equal capability. The most advanced AI systems remain concentrated in a handful of firms such as Google and OpenAI. These companies control not only the models themselves but also the infrastructure and expertise required to improve them. Building comparable systems requires vast amounts of capital, access to cutting-edge semiconductors, and highly specialized talent. These are not resources that can be scaled quickly, even for large economies like India. Therefore, the Global South’s role in AI today is still shaped by dependence as much as by aspiration. Countries can influence how AI is used, but they often rely on external systems to do so. They can call for inclusive governance, but they do not yet control the core technologies that would allow them to enforce it.

The India AI Impact Summit showed that the Global South is no longer content to remain on the sidelines of the AI revolution. It is asserting a role in shaping how the technology is used and governed. But influence without capacity has limits. As long as the core technologies, infrastructure, and expertise remain concentrated in a handful of giant firms, that role will remain constrained. The future of AI will not be decided only by who adopts it at scale, but by who builds and controls it.