New Delhi: If the opening day of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 was defined by organization lapses and empty aisles, day two was dominated by a flurry of investment announcements that reframed the event as a high-stakes capital story—even as disappointment lingered among exhibitors over the quality of footfalls.
Union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said Indian private startups are projecting as much as $200 billion of investments in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure over the next two years, alongside $17 billion in deep-tech funding, driven by interest from global investors and companies participating in the Summit.
“As we go forward, the confidence that the world has on India is going to grow. The Big Tech firms are looking at India as a trusted destination for engineering solutions and engineering innovation,” Vaishnaw said.
Venture funds, semiconductor majors, and domestic conglomerates followed with fresh commitments, signalling that investor appetite for India’s AI ambitions remains strong.
For instance, India Deep-Tech Alliance (IDTA), a group of private venture capital firms and technology companies formed in November, expanded its net capital to $2.5 billion on Tuesday, of which the group committed to invest $1 billion in Indian AI startups over the next three years.
IDTA counts Accel, Blume Ventures, Premji Invest, and Nvidia as members, and added US semiconductor firms Applied Materials, Lam Research and Micron, as well as domestic conglomerate Larsen & Toubro (:&T) and energy firm CG Power to the group.
Further, at the Impact AI PitchFest held as a part of the Summit, Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India) announced investments of ₹120 crore ($13 million) in five early-stage AI companies that won the contest, namely Companion Labs, Kello, Memfold AI, Round1 and Zoop. Peak XV did not disclose individual allocations.
Meanwhile, 16 member funds of the IVCA (Indian Venture and Alternate Capital Association)—including Accel, Chiratae Ventures and Prosus—collectively mobilised ₹500 crore ($55 million) in VC commitments for Indian AI startups at the same event.
A senior government official, speaking at the sidelines of the Summit, said the investments were announced organically, and “not as part of a consolidated effort to draw investments during the Summit”.
Investors hopeful
Investors struck an optimistic tone. Rajan Anandan, managing director 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, grow income, and build businesses using AI. This focus on meeting the real needs of Indian users and building products at population scale is what will define India’s leadership in AI,” Anandan said.
In an interview with Mint, Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and an early-stage investor in OpenAI, said that such investments could become the cornerstone for India’s investment ecosystem.
“Private investors must approach foundational AI projects from the lens of philanthropy, and developing AI use cases for social causes in healthcare and education will give India a foundational spate of technologies to take to the rest of the world. These investments will help India’s startups build out their products, and amplify what AI can really do,” Khosla said.
More incoming
In terms of investments, the government is focusing on the five AI layers—applications, models, semiconductor, infrastructure and energy, Vaishnaw said.
“We are expecting another 20,000 GPUs (graphic processing units) over and above the 38,000 GPUs that we already have in the compute layer,” the minister said. “In a week’s time, we’ll be placing orders for another 20,000 GPUs and they will be deployed within the next six months.”
As part of the ₹10,372 crore outlay for the India AI mission, the government is subsidising the compute costs for startups to use GPUs to build their AI models. There are 12 organisations that are currently getting support for development of indigenous foundational models or large language models.
Vaishnaw said the AI Mission 2.0 will focus on creating a bouquet 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 upon, similar to the UPI model, the minister said.
Addressing the conflict between AI companies and content creators, Vaishnaw stated that the government sincerely believes news creators and conventional media must get “fair valuation” for their content used to train AI models.
He mentioned that the government is in dialogue with big platforms, which have shown an inclination toward a process for “fair distribution of revenue”.
Organizational shortcomings
Despite the investment optimism, the AI expo at the Summit drew voices of disappointment as it failed to match what over 600 startups and 300 exhibitors at the venue had expected.
India’s AI expo went without an audience on day one on Monday, as organizational issues left them stranded.
Day two drew about 125,000 visitors, according to Abhishek Singh, additional secretary at Meity (ministry of electronics and information technology), who spoke at a press briefing.
Exhibitors, however, said that opening the expo for all visitors led to an underwhelming audience, as stalls cost up to ₹50 lakh for five days, but for the most part, did not lead to investors and global companies visiting them.
