India's sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) model is scheduled to be ready before the AI Impact Summit in February 2026, a top IT ministry official announced on Friday. Speaking at the India Mobile Congress 2025, Electronics and IT Secretary S. Krishnan made the timeline public. He indicated that while India was a late entrant to the AI space, the country has rapidly scaled up its compute infrastructure.
Krishnan confirmed the ambitious timeline: "Before the end of this year, hopefully, we should have our first foundational model, entirely an Indian foundational model. By the time of the India AI Summit, we should be able to launch India's sovereign model as well".
The India AI Impact Summit 2026 is scheduled for February 19 and 20.
Focus on indigenous infrastructure
Krishnan highlighted the progress made in building indigenous AI capabilities:
- Compute Power: India has rapidly deployed 38,000 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) against an initial target of 10,000 units, significantly enhancing the compute infrastructure.
- Future Expansion: The government is continuously enhancing this infrastructure and will soon make more GPUs available to Indian firms. Krishnan noted that GPU additions are being executed through an open bidding process every quarter.
- Indigenous GPUs: Regarding the development of indigenous GPUs, Krishnan stated that this will be a crucial goal under India Semiconductor Mission 2.0, which is currently under discussion.
Inclusivity and data sovereignty
Krishnan stressed that the government is concerned about the potential impact of AI and is committed to developing platforms that are inclusive.
- Sector-Specific Models: "We are targeting a lot of smaller models which are sector-specific," Krishnan said, emphasising that the delivery must be "meaningful and enhance productivity" in sectors where AI can make the greatest difference.
- Data Hosting: Ministry of Electronics and IT Additional Secretary Abhishek Singh added that India's sovereign AI model will be entirely trained on Indian data sets and hosted on Indian servers.
- Domestic Support: Singh also confirmed that the government is supporting 12 domestic firms and expects at least two of them to have their foundational model ready by the end of the year.
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