The First Global South AI Governance Forum

In February 2026, New Delhi hosted the India AI Impact Summit at the Bharat Mandapam. This event marked a historic milestone: it was the first time a Global South nation hosted a premier international AI governance forum, following previous summits in Bletchley Park (UK), Seoul (Korea), and Paris (France). [1]

Attended by 118 countries, over 500 leading AI experts, and drawing more than five lakh (500,000) visitors, the event functioned less as a traditional technology conference and more as an industrial infrastructure summit. [2][3]

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani articulated the overarching strategic goal: while the West focuses on building foundational models, India must master the complex challenge of “diffusion,” establishing itself as the “AI use-case capital of the world.” [4]

The MANAV Vision: Modi’s AI Framework

Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled the “MANAV” vision—Moral, Accountable, National sovereignty, Accessible, Valid—emphasizing that technology must be developed ethically to multiply human capabilities and not reduce humans to “mere raw material.” [5]

Nation-Building Capital: Ambani and Adani’s Vision

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance, committed approximately $110 billion (₹10 lakh crore) over seven years toward multi-gigawatt AI-ready data centers in Jamnagar, nationwide edge-compute layers, and sovereign compute infrastructure. He framed these investments not as speculative venture bets, but as “patient, disciplined nation-building capital” required to make intelligence “as ubiquitous as connectivity.” [5]

The Adani Group committed $100 billion to scale data center capacity from 2GW to 5GW by 2035, powered entirely by renewable energy, catalyzing a total $250 billion ecosystem. [6]

This massive influx of capital reflects a geopolitical reality: nations without sovereign compute capacity risk becoming digital colonies in the AI era. [5]

The New Delhi Frontier AI Impact Commitments

India orchestrated the signing of the “New Delhi Frontier AI Impact Commitments” by major Western tech giants (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta) and domestic innovators (Sarvam, BharatGen, Gnani, Soket). Unveiled by IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, this voluntary framework pivots global regulation away from abstract existential risks and toward measurable, real-world deployment metrics. [8]

The framework establishes two primary pillars:

Advance Analysis on Real-World AI Usage: Signatories committed to generating and publishing anonymized, aggregated statistical insights tracking how AI adoption impacts jobs, skills, productivity, and economic transformation across vital sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and public services. [8]

Multilingual and Contextual Evaluations: Organizations pledged to collaborate with local governments and researchers to develop new datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation methods specifically for under-represented languages and cultural contexts native to the Global South. [8][9]