Sawt Falasteen - US tech giants announce India deals at AI summit

This week's AI Impact Summit is the fourth annual gathering to discuss how to govern the fast-evolving technology -- and also an opportunity for India to raise its profile in the booming sector.

"India's going to have an extraordinary trajectory with AI and we want to be a partner," Google CEO Sundar Pichai told reporters as the US firm unveiled a plan to boost connectivity to the South Asian country.

New direct undersea connections from India to Singapore, South Africa and Australia will be constructed, it said, touting faster connections as demand for computing power, including AI, ramps up.

It is part of Google's $15 billion investment announced in October to construct its largest AI data centre hub outside the United States, in Visakhapatnam, a port city in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh.

Also on Wednesday, the California-based Nvidia -- the world's most valuable company -- said it was teaming up with three Indian cloud computing providers to provide advanced processors for data centres that can train and run AI systems.

Dozens of world leaders and ministerial delegations are in New Delhi for the summit to discuss the opportunities and threats, from job losses to misinformation, that AI poses.

Last year India leapt to third place -- overtaking South Korea and Japan -- in an annual global ranking of AI competitiveness calculated by Stanford University researchers.

But despite its plans for large-scale infrastructure and grand ambitions for innovation, experts say the country has a long way to go before it can rival the United States and China.

- 'Power India's growth' -

The AI conference has brought a flurry of deals, with IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw saying Tuesday that India expects more than $200 billion in investments over the next two years, including roughly $90 billion already committed.

Mumbai cloud and data centre provider L&T said Wednesday it was teaming up with Nvidia to build what it touted as "India's largest gigawatt-scale AI factory".

"We are laying the foundation for world-class AI infrastructure that will power India's growth," said Nvidia boss Jensen Huang in a statement that did not put a figure on the investment.

Nvidia is also working with other Indian AI infrastructure players such as Yotta, which announced a $2 billion deal with the US company that will provide it with 20,000 top-end AI processors.

Nvidia's Huang is not attending the AI summit but other top US tech figures joining include OpenAI's Sam Altman, Meta chief AI officer Alexandr Wang and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Microsoft said it was investing $50 billion this decade to boost AI adoption in developing countries, while US artificial intelligence startup Anthropic and Indian IT giant Infosys said they would build AI agents for the telecoms industry.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other world leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva are expected to deliver a statement at the end of the week about how they plan to address concerns raised by AI technology.

But experts say the broad focus of the event and vague promises made at previous global AI summits in France, South Korea and Britain mean that concrete commitments are unlikely.

Nick Patience, practice lead for AI at tech research group Futurum, told AFP that nonbinding declarations could still "set the tone for what acceptable AI governance looks like".

But "the largest AI companies deploy capabilities at a pace that makes 18-month legislative cycles look glacial," Patience said.

"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."

J.AbuHassan--SF-PST