When the fourth edition of the AI Impact Summit opens at Bharat Mandapam on Monday — its first outing in the Global South — it will do so against a backdrop that is anything but placid.

In recent months, artificial intelligence (AI) has triggered multi-billion-dollar equity deals, piled fresh debt onto balance sheets, rattled global markets and sent IT services stocks into a tailspin after the launch of Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. Boardrooms are buzzing, investors are jittery and employees are anxious about what agentic AI could mean for white-collar work.

And yet, inside the summit venue, the mood is expected to be one of ambition rather than alarm.

From OpenAI’s Sam Altman to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Google’s Sundar Pichai, the world’s most powerful AI architects will share the stage with policymakers and 20 heads of state, including French President Emmanuel Macron and his Brazilian counterpart Lula da Silva, to debate safety, regulation, sustainability and the future of work — even as India rolls out its own AI playbook.

The Delhi summit builds on earlier editions in the UK, South Korea and France, but this time the stakes feel sharper. Delegates will grapple with uncomfortable but urgent questions: How far can productivity be stretched? Which use cases will scale fastest? How soon can agentic AI be embedded into legacy IT systems to generate real economic value? And can the planet sustain AI’s voracious appetite for power and water?

For host India, the event is both showcase and signal. New Delhi wants to be seen not merely as a supplier of data to train global models, but as a serious participant across the AI stack — applications, models, chipsets, infrastructure and even energy.

Announcements of fresh capital commitments are expected to cross $40 billion. Officials suggest the country’s GPU capacity — currently about 40,000 — could double or even triple in short order. Microsoft has already pledged $17.5 billion to scale up AI and cloud infrastructure in India; Google has committed $15 billion; Amazon has promised significant investments of its own.

The scale of global spending underscores the moment. The four hyperscalers — Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta Platforms — together spent $376 billion in 2025, with capex projected to surge 65% to $620 billion in 2026. AI is no longer an experiment; it is a capital-intensive arms race.

India hopes to carve its niche within this race. Indigenous initiatives such as Sarvam and BharatGen are likely to command attention, alongside a clutch of startups showcasing large language models (LLMs) and small language models (SLMs) tailored to Indian languages and contexts. For long, limited access to compute has stalled the country’s ambitions around foundational models. The summit could mark a turning point if funding and infrastructure commitments materialise.

Indian IT outsourcing majors, under pressure from slowing traditional demand and AI-driven automation, are expected to outline how they plan to re-jig their business models. The key question: which layers of the AI value chain will they play in — and how quickly can they pivot?

There is also a geopolitical undertone. With China effectively out of bounds for US Big Tech, India has emerged as a strategic frontier. OpenAI and Google are offering AI assistants to Indian users at no cost, underscoring the market’s importance. As Abhishek Singh, joint secretary at the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), puts it: “Think of AI, think of India.”

Experts say the wager is straightforward. If India can attract capital, it can build intellectual property. If it can channel that IP towards solving local problems — in agriculture, healthcare, governance and education — it can scale solutions globally.

But for every promise, there is a perturbation. The Microsoft AI chief’s warning that most white-collar jobs could be automated within 18 months has amplified fears of widespread disruption. New jobs will be created, but enterprises have a narrow window to reinvent themselves. Delay could be costly.

The AI Impact Summit, therefore, is not just a technology jamboree. It is a high-stakes reckoning with the forces reshaping markets, business models and labour.

A ministry of external affairs statement says the summit is anchored in three Sutras: People, Planet and Progress which define India’s approach to cooperation on AI.” But in the age of AI, ambition is abundant. The real test — and the real story — lies in execution. As the conversations unfold in Delhi, the world will be watching not just for dazzling demos or billion-dollar pledges, but for clarity on how this transformative technology can be governed, sustained and shared.