India plans to unveil a new voice-enabled large language model (LLM) before it hosts a major global AI summit in New Delhi next year, a senior government official has said, outlining an ambitious push to accelerate the country’s artificial intelligence capabilities. Abhishek Singh, Director General of the National Informatics Centre and Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT, told technology leaders in Silicon Valley this week that AI will play a “central enabling role” in India’s rise as the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
“We are recognised as the world’s largest, fastest growing economy… growing at the rate of 8.2 per cent,” Singh said, adding that India aims to scale its GDP from about $4 trillion today to $30 trillion by 2047. Digital public infrastructure built on systems such as Aadhaar, UPI and DigiLocker, he said, forms “the basic foundation” for this vision.
India launched its India AI Mission last year after identifying major capability gaps in compute and research. Singh noted the country had just 600 GPUs across its ecosystem, prompting the government to work with industry to make 40,000 GPUs available at subsidised rates. Funding has also been extended to develop 12 Indian LLM and small language model projects, including specialised models for healthcare and materials science.
Two of these efforts — led by IIT Madras and IIT Bombay — are nearing completion. “Before the summit… we should be able to announce an Indian LLM, which will be primarily a voice-based LLM,” Singh said, stressing the importance of delivering AI services across Indian languages to connect “the remaining 500 million people.”
To support innovation, Singh said India has created a national datasets platform, AI Coach, which hosts 3,500 public and private datasets. Work is under way on 30 scalable AI solutions including diagnostic tools for tuberculosis, cataract and diabetic retinopathy, and an AI assistant for farmers.
Talent development and safety will be key pillars, he said, highlighting efforts to expand AI education, set up data labs and build tools for bias mitigation, privacy protection and deepfake detection. India has also established an AI Safety Institute.
The AI Impact Summit 2026 in Delhi — the first major global AI gathering in the developing world — is expected to draw delegates from over 100 countries, including 15 heads of government and 50 CEOs. Singh said the event will focus on democratising access to AI so emerging economies “do not end up only becoming AI users.”
Planned outcomes include a charter for shared AI resources, an AI commons repository, workplace transition principles and commitments from frontier model developers to share usage data with governments.
International speakers at the Silicon Valley event — including leaders from Anthropic, Zoom, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Microsoft, Salesforce, OpenAI, Equinix and NVIDIA — emphasised India’s growing importance in the global AI landscape.
“India now has the second largest number of AI users in the world after the US,” said Sumir Chadha of WestBridge Capital. “Indian consumers could soon be more AI-facile than consumers anywhere else in the world.”
UN Special Envoy Amandeep Singh Gill said the Delhi summit comes at a time when “as AI has accelerated, so has multilateralism,” insisting that “everyone needs a seat at the table.”
Google senior executive Ben Gomes said he was “amazed” by India’s scale and potential, citing investments in data centres, learning tools and sustainability technology. “We really believe in the role of the teacher… We want to enhance that connection, not replace it,” he added. Gadgets Now
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