AI Impact Summit 2026: The Global South’s Bid for Foundation Model Autonomy

TL;DR: Prime Minister Narendra Modi chaired a high-level roundtable at Bharat Mandapam today with a cohort of 12 Indian AI startups building indigenous foundation models. The session, a precursor to the India AI Impact Summit 2026, featured CEOs of global giants like OpenAI and Google, emphasizing India's role as a "Full-Stack AI Sovereign."

Vichaarak Perspective

The world is currently fighting over "who has the most GPUs," but the real battle is "who has the most representative data." The 12 startups presenting to the Prime Minister today—working on everything from multilingual LLMs to medical diagnostics—represent India's escape from the "API trap." For too long, Indian startups were merely building thin wrappers around Silicon Valley models. By backing foundation models that speak Bodo, Maithili, and Tamil, India is building an AI stack that the West cannot replicate. As Harkirat Singh (@harkirat1892) often notes in his technical projects, AI sovereignty isn't about isolation; it's about ensuring the "intelligence" of your country isn't controlled by a single switch in San Francisco.

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FAQ

Q: What is a "Foundation Model"? A: It is a large-scale AI model trained on a vast amount of data that can be adapted to a wide range of downstream tasks, like ChatGPT or Claude.

Q: Why is India building its own models instead of using OpenAI? A: Sovereign AI ensures data privacy for citizens, captures linguistic diversity that global models ignore, and reduces dependency on foreign infrastructure.

Q: Which startups were part of the 12-company cohort? A: The cohort includes innovators in Indian language LLMs, text-to-video for e-commerce, and healthcare diagnostic platforms.

Author: Harkirat Singh | Editor-in-Chief, Startoholics