AI Impact Summit Day 3 spotlights global partnerships, infra scale-ups

Day three of the AI Impact Summit underscored India's central role in global AI expansion, with new investments, cross-border partnerships and large-scale infrastructure commitments

Day three of the ongoing AI Impact Summit sharpened the spotlight on India’s bid to position itself at the centre of the global AI realignment, with a string of high-value announcements spanning capital commitments, cross-border partnerships and infrastructure scale-up. The focus of these announcements firmly centred on the Global South, with India positioned as the epicentre of this next phase of AI expansion.

 

Software giant Microsoft on Wednesday said the company is on track to invest $50 billion by the end of the decade to expand artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure and capabilities across countries in the Global South.

 

While delivering a keynote address, Brad Smith, vice-chair and president of Microsoft, said there is inequality between the Global North and South but AI can assist in closing the gap, allowing the Global South to catch up on economic growth.

 

 

“We need to bring the infrastructure that the Global South needs — that means data centres, connectivity and electricity. That’s why Satya Nadella announced that Microsoft would be spending $17 billion in India. It's why we’re on pace to spend $50 billion by the end of the decade bringing AI here.”

 

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, announced the India–America Connect initiative that would bring in a new subsea cable route to increase AI connectivity between the US, India and multiple locations across the southern hemisphere.

 

Pichai also said that with infrastructure investments, skilling people should also be a focus. “Which is why we are announcing one of our most ambitious skilling programmes here. This includes the new Google AI function certificate programme that helps people master AI at work,” he said. In India, Google will be working with Wadhwani AI to reach students early on.

 

Google also announced a new $30 million Google.org AI for Science Impact Challenge “to drive the next generation of scientific breakthroughs.”

 

Pichai added that Google DeepMind is partnering with the Indian government as part of the global national partnership programme. This will bring access to frontier AI capabilities.

 

In a significant domestic infrastructure push, Larsen & Toubro and NVIDIA announced plans to build a gigawatt-scale AI factory, signalling ambitions to create one of the largest AI compute backbones in the region.

 

The venture will scale NVIDIA GPU cluster deployment at its Chennai data centre up to 30 MW capacity in its 300-acre gigawatt-scalable campus and at the new 40 MW data centre in Mumbai currently under execution.

 

In a statement, Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said that this partnership will lay the foundation for world-class AI infrastructure that will power India’s growth and help realise the full vision of India AI.

 

“AI is driving the largest infrastructure buildout in human history — everyone will use it, every company will be powered by it and every country will build it. Prime Minister Modi has outlined a bold vision to democratise AI access across the Global South and position India as a global hub for digital infrastructure,” he said.

 

This AI factory model will be able to deliver advanced AI services to global off-takers, hyperscalers and India Inc, including manufacturing, infrastructure, energy, financial services, healthcare and public services, thereby moving from experimentation to production-scale deployment. It is designed to provide standardised, enterprise-grade AI capabilities, enabling predictable performance, security and time-to-value for industrial and services use cases.