New Delhi is sweating. It’s not just the premature March heat baking the pavement outside the Bharat Mandapam; it’s the collective anxiety of a nation trying to program its way out of the middle-income trap. From March 12 to 14, the India AI Impact Summit 2026 will take over the capital. It’s the usual circus of high-thread-count kurtas, sandalwood incense, and the low-frequency hum of portable cooling units struggling to keep server racks from melting.

The brochure says this is about "Sovereign Intelligence." The reality is a bit more expensive.

The agenda is a three-day marathon of techno-nationalism. Day one kicks off with the "Compute Sovereignty" keynote. The government is expected to finally pull the tarp off its $1.2 billion national AI cluster—a massive hoard of H200 chips snagged just before the latest export skirmish. It’s a desperate, necessary play. For years, India has been the world’s back office. Now, it wants to be the brain. But brains require electricity, and the grid in Uttar Pradesh is already flickering at the mere thought of those cooling towers.

The speaker list is exactly who you’d expect. You’ve got the domestic titans—the Reliance and Tata executives—who have spent the last decade building digital moats and are now rebranding as "AI-first" entities. Expect a lot of talk about "inclusion" from men whose net worth could fund a small space program. Then there are the Silicon Valley tourists. Sam Altman is rumored to be making his third "pivotal" visit to Delhi, likely to remind everyone that while India has the data, his company still has the keys to the kingdom.

But the real friction isn't on the main stage. It’s in the fine print of the "Digital India Act 2026" revisions scheduled for a closed-door session on day two.

There’s a specific, nasty conflict brewing over the "Bhashini" project—the government's push to build LLMs for 22 local languages. To do it, they need data. Massive amounts of it. The friction lies in a $450 million copyright lawsuit currently being whispered about in the hallways of the Delhi High Court. Local publishers are tired of their archives being scraped to train models that will eventually replace their columnists. The government wants the data for free. The creators want to eat. It’s a classic standoff, dressed up in the language of "national duty."

Day three shifts to "AI for the Global South." This is the branding exercise. India wants to export its Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) stack—the same tech that made UPI a success—but with an AI layer slapped on top. It’s a pitch to every developing nation that’s tired of paying a "Western tax" to Microsoft or Google. The highlight will be the launch of "Indus-3," a lightweight model designed to run on cheap smartphones. It’s impressive, sure, but it still struggles with sarcasm in Marathi.

Don't expect much talk about the labor shift. The summit organizers have carefully curated a panel on "The Evolution of Work," which is a polite way of saying "The Death of the Call Center." They’ll show glossy slides of former data entry clerks becoming "Prompt Engineers." They won't mention the 30% dip in junior coding hires across the Bengaluru tech hubs over the last eighteen months. That doesn't fit the vibe of a summit meant to signal strength.

The price of admission for a startup booth in the "Innovation Zone" is a cool 500,000 rupees. For that, you get a patch of carpet and the chance to pitch to a venture capitalist who is likely just a glorified spreadsheet aggregator. Most of these startups are just wrappers—thin layers of code sitting on top of American models, pretending to be homegrown. It’s a "fake it till you make it" culture on a continental scale.

The summit will conclude with a gala dinner where the "IndiaAI" mission awards will be handed out. There will be selfies. There will be tweets about a "new era." But as the delegates pile into their subsidized electric sedans on the final evening, the fundamental math remains unchanged. You can build all the models you want, but you can't manufacture the electricity to run them or the water to cool them out of thin air.

By March 15th, the banners will come down, the H200s will continue to whir in their climate-controlled bunkers, and the rest of the country will go back to wondering why the weather is getting so much weirder.

I wonder if anyone at the summit will ask the "Sovereign AI" to fix the power grid first, or if that’s considered too low-stakes for a billion-dollar algorithm.