February 16, 2026
Date: February 16, 2026
The Global AI Safety Summit series — which had previously convened in the United Kingdom, South Korea, and France — held its first developing-world edition in New Delhi, drawing an estimated 250,000 attendees. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Sundar Pichai of Google, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and the heads of Microsoft and Amazon attended alongside French President Macron and Brazilian President Lula. India’s strategic positioning was deliberate: it is not competing to build frontier AI models against the United States or China. It is positioning itself as the deployment and governance bridge between advanced economies and the global south. The numbers substantiate the leverage. India has 72 million daily ChatGPT users — more than any other country. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon have committed a combined $68 billion in AI and cloud infrastructure in India through 2030. India leads the world in AI skill penetration at 2.8 times the global average and is adding more new developers to GitHub annually than any other country, on pace to surpass the United States as the largest developer community by 2028. India’s competitive strategy is explicit: let advanced economies build the models, then demonstrate how to deploy them at scale for 1.4 billion people while keeping costs low — drawing on experience building the world’s largest digital public infrastructure systems.
For economic development planners, site selectors, and technology investors evaluating the Coachella Valley: the India summit redraws the map of where AI deployment expertise is accumulating. The valley’s relocation and economic development thesis has focused primarily on domestic coastal-to-desert migration — Bay Area and Los Angeles technology professionals evaluating the desert as a primary or secondary market. The India signal adds a second dimension. Indian technology professionals with AI deployment expertise — the 4,000 to 5,000 specialists capable of building AI infrastructure from scratch — are among the most globally mobile in the world and disproportionately represented in California’s technology workforce. The same cost structure, quality of life, and remote work infrastructure that makes the valley attractive to Bay Area professionals applies to this demographic. More immediately, the summit’s framing of deployment at scale as a competitive advantage rather than a consolation prize for not building frontier models maps directly onto what AICV has documented as the valley’s own strategic position: not building AI, but becoming the intelligence layer for how AI understands and interacts with this region.
India’s summit positioning reflects a calculated response to the US-China AI competition dynamic. Neither the United States nor China can pursue AI dominance at scale without India’s market, talent, and geopolitical alignment. India is converting that structural necessity into leverage — accepting investment from US technology companies while maintaining strategic ambiguity about full alignment, and simultaneously entertaining Chinese digital infrastructure offers through the Belt and Road framework. The summit was the most visible expression yet of what Indian officials have described as non-alignment in the AI era: not picking sides, but becoming indispensable to both. For AICV’s documented interest in how AI governance shapes where economic activity concentrates, the summit marks the moment that governance moved from a Western regulatory project — Brussels and Washington setting rules — to a genuinely multipolar negotiation in which the developing world has a seat at the table and the leverage to use it.