Tech Billionaires Gather in Delhi for AI Expo as Modi Strives for South Asian Leadership
Tech billionaires from Silicon Valley are set to arrive in Delhi this week for an AI summit hosted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This summit aims to address the global south's quest for control over rapidly developing AI technology. The week-long AI Impact Summit will bring together thousands of tech executives, government officials, and AI safety experts, alongside tech giants valued at trillions of dollars. These companies will interact with leaders from countries like Kenya and Indonesia, where average wages are significantly lower than $1,000 monthly.
Key figures in the AI industry, including Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei, heads of Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, respectively, will be in attendance. Rishi Sunak and George Osborne, a former British prime minister and chancellor, will advocate for increased AI adoption. Sunak has ties to Microsoft and Anthropic, while Osborne is spearheading OpenAI's efforts to expand ChatGPT's user base beyond its current 800 million users.
Modi, who will address the summit on Thursday, is positioning India as the AI hub for South Asia and Africa. The agenda will focus on AI's potential to revolutionize agriculture, water management, and public health. Governments from Kenya, Senegal, Mauritius, Togo, Indonesia, and Egypt will be represented by their ministers.
However, Modi's enthusiasm for AI has raised concerns among civil liberties advocates. They have expressed worries about India's potential use of AI for state surveillance, discrimination against minorities, and influencing elections. Despite these criticisms, Modi has emphasized the summit's theme of "Welfare for all, happiness for all."
The summit is witnessing a debate between a new form of AI colonialism from US tech firms and an alternative "techno-Gandhism," where AI is employed for social justice and the benefit of marginalized communities. This Delhi meeting is the first global AI summit to be held in the global south, following previous summits in the UK, Korea, and France.
Indian commentators emphasize that the true value of AI lies in its ability to improve the lives of people in the global south, facing some of the world's most challenging circumstances. In contrast, US AI companies are focused on achieving supremacy, competing with each other and China, and implementing AI for various applications, including shopping, personal assistance, and agentic systems that could automate white-collar jobs.
António Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, will be present to mediate the discussion. He has expressed concerns about AI becoming a privilege of the most developed countries or a division between superpowers. The summit is the fourth iteration of the AI Impact Summit, launched by Sunak in 2023 at Bletchley Park, UK, with a focus on international coordination to prevent catastrophic risks from advanced AI models. Subsequent summits were held in Seoul in 2024 and Paris in 2025.
Safety remains a critical concern, with Yoshua Bengio, a renowned AI expert, expressing fears about the potential for powerful AI systems to enable cyber- and bioweapons attacks. Nicolas Miaihle, co-founder of the AI Safety Connect group, highlights the ongoing risks of AI-enabled warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East, emphasizing the need for urgent attention and intervention by world leaders.
Despite the summit's importance, the Trump administration continues to resist regulating US AI companies. The White House is not expected to send a high-level representative, with Sriram Krishnan, the senior AI policy adviser, as the highest-ranked speaker. This lack of US involvement may hinder consensus on a regulatory framework for AI.
Tech giants like Google are focusing on AI's educational applications in India, leveraging the country's numerous languages to enhance the functionality of large language models. Google's investments in India include a $15 billion partnership with Gautam Adani, one of the country's wealthiest billionaires, to establish a gigawatt-scale AI data center in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, with subsea cables connecting to other global regions.
