Narendra Modi

Narendra Modi (born 1950) has been prime minister of India since 2014, and has positioned AI as the next chapter of the state-backed digital infrastructure — Aadhaar identity, UPI payments — that defined his first decade in power. In March 2024 his cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission, a ₹10,372-crore (roughly $1.25 billion) program funding shared GPU compute, Indian-language foundation models, and AI skilling for the world’s most populous nation.

From Paris to Delhi

Modi co-chaired the February 2025 AI Action Summit in Paris alongside Emmanuel Macron, where his opening address argued for AI that is inclusive, efficient, and free of bias — noting that the human brain designs space missions using less power than most lightbulbs, so AI models should be efficient too. Rejecting job-loss fatalism, he insisted history shows technology changes work rather than destroying it, and offered India as host of the next summit.

That offer became the India AI Impact Summit, inaugurated by Modi at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi in February 2026 — the first global AI summit hosted in the Global South, built around the Sanskrit theme Sarvajana Hitaya, Sarvajana Sukhaya (“welfare for all, happiness for all”) and drawing heads of state and AI leaders from more than 100 countries. Critics note the gap between summit rhetoric and India’s thin domestic AI-safety regulation, and that its foundation-model efforts still trail the U.S. and China; Modi’s wager is that scale, talent, and cheap digital infrastructure make India AI’s largest laboratory.