One year, 12 startups: India AI Mission faces its first real test

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. NEW DELHI: India’s AI Impact Summit 2026 is emerging as an early gauge of whether the country’s state-backed artificial intelligence (AI) startups can demonstrate meaningful progress in a rapidly shifting global AI landscape, as companies backed under the government’s India AI Mission prepare to showcase their models this week.

The summit opened to a stuttered start on Monday, with attendees reporting heavy crowds, overpacked meeting rooms and patchy organisation on the ground, issues the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) is expected to smooth out over the rest of the week. Daniel Otieno, a delegate from Kenya visiting as an AI literacy specialist for learning disabilities, said navigating the venue was one of the biggest challenges.

“On top of that, the security personnel were not equipped well enough to understand global delegates, and guide them," Otieno said, adding that there was confusion around timings and access to basic amenities such as water. At the centre of this showcase are 12 startups backed by MeitY's ₹10,372 crore India AI Mission, a programme launched in March 2024 to address what policymakers then saw as the biggest barrier to domestic AI development - the high cost of computing power required to train models.

Since then, the economics of AI have evolved quickly. Advances led by China’s DeepSeek have pushed down the perceived cost of training models, even as Nvidia continues to dominate advanced AI chips.

Against this backdrop, India has built a government-subsidized framework under which data-centre operators provide graphic processing units (GPUs) as a service to startups through Mission support. Sarvam became the first startup to receive access to the