Key Highlights
- India AI Impact Summit opens with big policy and big money: a new $1.1B state-backed VC fund targets AI and advanced manufacturing.
- Sam Altman: India has 100M weekly ChatGPT users—now the No.2 market globally, driven heavily by students.
- Blackstone takes majority in Neysa amid a $600M equity round (plus $600M debt) to deploy 20,000+ GPUs in India.
- Anthropic opens first India office in Bengaluru; says India is Claude’s second‑largest market.
India kicked off the four‑day India AI Impact Summit with a flurry of funding, infrastructure, and market‑scale milestones that signal a step‑change in the country’s AI ambitions. New public capital, record private bets, and usage stats from OpenAI and Anthropic point to India as both a massive AI consumer market and a fast‑rising build hub.
How is India funding the AI push?
The government announced a $1.1B state‑backed VC fund for AI and advanced manufacturing. The goal is simple: move faster from research to market.
Meanwhile, Blackstone led a major $600M equity investment in Neysa. The startup also plans to raise another $600M in debt. As a result, Neysa will deploy more than 20,000 GPUs, sharply expanding India’s compute capacity.
How big is India’s AI user base?
India continues to grow as a global AI consumer powerhouse. Sam Altman revealed that the country now has 100M weekly ChatGPT users, ranking second only to the U.S. Students form the largest slice of this base.
At the same time, Anthropic opened its first India office in Bengaluru. The company confirmed India is now Claude’s second‑largest market. Nearly half of all usage here involves coding or math‑heavy tasks.
Where is the compute coming from?
To boost enterprise‑grade AI deployments, AMD and TCS announced a joint plan to co‑develop rack‑scale “Helios” AI infrastructure. They also introduced a 200MW AI‑ready data‑center blueprint designed for future “sovereign AI factories.”
Additionally, Bengaluru startup C2i raised $15M to tackle one of AI’s new bottlenecks: power. The company claims it can cut data‑center energy losses by roughly 10%, which could improve performance and reduce costs.
What are leaders saying about jobs?
Former HCL CEO Vineet Nayar warned that Indian IT firms will focus on profits, not job creation. He argued that new jobs must come from mass‑scale startups.
Tech investor Vinod Khosla went further. He predicted that IT and BPO services may “almost completely disappear” within five years. He also urged India’s 250M youth to build and export AI‑based products instead of relying on legacy service roles.
Bottom line
Day 1 of the India AI Impact Summit showed a clear message. India is pushing capital, compute, and a massive user base forward at the same time. This combination could help the country accelerate its shift from an AI consumer to a global AI creator.
