A mega two-day AI-oriented event will be held in New Delhi on February 19-20 and inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The India-AI Impact Summit 2026 will bring global leaders, innovators, policymakers, and the AI industry on the same platform to discuss a collective vision for Artificial Intelligence as nations race to harness its transformative potential for economic growth.
"In February, India will be hosting the AI Impact Summit. It is a great honour for our country. After the summits in the UK, South Korea, and France, the next Summit will be held in India," informed Union IT Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, adding that many nations and global leaders will be participating in the event.
Additionally, under the IndiaAI Foundation Models pillar, eight projects were launched by the government on Thursday, all designed to build indigenous AI models trained on India-specific data.
The initiatives were selected from about 506 proposals, spanning multilingual and domain-specific models, scientific discovery, healthcare, and industrial innovation, among others.
The list of entities that have been selected include Avatar AI for creating specialised 'AI Avatars' optimised for Indian languages and domains such as agriculture, healthcare, and governance, and IIT Bombay Consortium Bharat Gen for developing multilingual and multimodal models with an open-source approach to support applications in agriculture, finance, legal, health, and education.
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Fractal Analytics will build India’s first large reasoning model designed for structured reasoning, STEM disciplines, and medical problem-solving. Tech Mahindra Maker’s Lab will design model for Indic languages (with a focus on Hindi dialects), alongside an agentic AI platform, Orion, for government applications.
Zenteiq is developing BrahmAI, a science-driven multimodal foundation model to advance engineering intelligence, scientific computing, and industrial innovation, while another entity GenLoop will be creating small language models to support all 22 scheduled Indian languages with native reasoning and content moderation.
Intellihealth is proposing a model to enable early screening of neurological disorders and advance brain–computer interface research, and Shodh AI is developing a model for material discovery, integrating AI into experimental workflows to accelerate innovation in material sciences.
Further, 30 Data and AILabs have been launched pan-India, forming the first wave of a 570-lab network.
The first 27 labs are in partnership with NIELIT, established across key Tier 2 & 3 cities, and three labs are set up in Mokokchung, Mhow, and Mohali with Intel. These labs will deliver foundational AI and data training courses under the FutureSkills initiative of the IndiaAI Mission.
"Delivered through the Data and AI Labs network, new foundational courses aim to equip learners to participate in the AI economy by offering entry-level training in data annotation (images, text, audio) and data curation (organising and labeling datasets)," an official release said.
Also, IndiaAI Fellowship Program has been expanded to support 13,500 scholars, covering 8,000 undergraduates, 5,000 postgraduates, and 500 PhD researchers from all disciplines.
This brings the IndiaAI Fellowship at par with PM Research Fellowships, the release said adding these fellowships are now open to students from diverse disciplines across engineering, medicine, law, commerce, business, and liberal arts.
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