Nvidia announced major GPU deployments and partnerships in India at an AI summit
Nvidia Corp unveiled major partnerships with Indian computing firms at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, as tech companies rushed to announce deals and investments. Mumbai-based Larsen & Toubro Ltd (L&T) said it was teaming up with Nvidia, the world's most valuable company, to build what it described as "India's largest gigawatt-scale AI factory." CEO Jensen Huang stated in a comment that "We are laying the foundation for world-class AI infrastructure that will power India's growth," though no investment figure was disclosed. L&T will use Nvidia's powerful processors to provide data center capacity of up to 30 megawatts in Chennai and 40 megawatts in Mumbai.
Nvidia announced it was also working with other Indian AI infrastructure players, including Yotta Data Services Pvt Ltd, which will deploy more than 20,000 top-end Nvidia Blackwell processors as part of a US$2 billion investment. The summit drew dozens of world leaders and ministerial delegations to discuss AI's opportunities and threats, from job losses to misinformation. India's AI competitiveness has surged, leaping to third place globally—overtaking South Korea and Japan—in Stanford University researchers' annual ranking, yet experts say the country has a long way to go before rivaling the US and China.
The conference catalyzed a flurry of additional deals. On Tuesday, India's Adani Group announced it would invest US$100 billion by 2035 to develop "hyperscale AI-ready data centers." Microsoft Corp said it was investing US$50 billion this decade to boost AI adoption in developing countries, while Anthropic PBC and Indian IT giant Infosys Ltd said they would work together to build AI agents for the telecoms industry. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are expected to deliver a statement at the end of the week about plans to address AI-related concerns.
Experts remain skeptical of concrete outcomes from such summits. Nick Patience, practice lead for AI at tech research group Futurum, acknowledged that nonbinding declarations could "set the tone for what acceptable AI governance looks like," but cautioned that "the largest AI companies deploy capabilities at a pace that makes 18-month legislative cycles look glacial," adding "So it's a case of whether governments can converge fast enough to create meaningful guardrails before de facto standards are set by the companies themselves." Meanwhile, Google DeepMind vice president John Jumper, who won the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on artificial intelligence, is leaving the company to join Anthropic PBC, a departure that strains Google's efforts to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI in the race to build the most powerful AI models.