The air was thick with the smell of expensive cologne and cheap desperation. Inside the Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, the Bharat of tomorrow was being sold to the highest bidder, one slide deck at a time. It’s called the India AI Impact Summit, a title that suggests something heavy hitting, but mostly felt like a high-stakes bake sale for algorithms.

Forty-five countries sent their suits. Every Big Tech firm with a stock price to protect sent their "Vice President of Ethical Innovation" or some other equally fictional title. They weren’t there for the samosas. They were there because India has 1.4 billion people who haven’t yet been fully harvested for training data. That’s a lot of digital topsoil.

The vibe was predictable. Panic masked as progress.

In one corner, you had the American giants, grinning through the existential dread of their next quarterly earnings report. In the other, European regulators trying to find a way to tax things they don't understand. And in the middle, the Indian government, clutching its $1.24 billion "IndiaAI Mission" like a golden ticket. It’s a lot of money on paper. In reality, it’s barely enough to keep the lights on in a single Tier-3 data center in Virginia. But don't tell the bureaucrats that. They’re busy talking about "Sovereign AI," a phrase that sounds noble until you realize it just means the government wants its own keys to the back door.

The friction was everywhere, rubbing the paint off the polished talking points.

Take the GPU problem. India wants to build its own massive compute infrastructure. It wants to stop being a "back office" and start being a "foundry." But there’s a catch. A big, expensive, silicon-shaped catch. The price of an Nvidia H100 chip has ballooned to the point where it costs more than a decent apartment in South Delhi. To build the "impact" they’re talking about, India needs tens of thousands of them. The math doesn't add up. You can’t build a digital revolution on a budget that wouldn't cover the marketing spend for a new iPhone launch.

Then there’s the power.

You don't just "do" AI. You burn coal to do AI. You suck up millions of gallons of water to cool the racks. In a country where rolling blackouts are still a regular feature of life in the heat of June, the trade-off is grim. Do you keep the fans spinning in a village in Bihar, or do you feed the hunger of a chatbot that summarizes emails for mid-level managers in Bangalore? Nobody at the summit wanted to answer that. They were too busy talking about "inclusion."

The CEOs were the worst part. They paced the stage like preachers, telling us how their specific flavor of math is going to fix the world. They won't mention that their models are basically just very sophisticated plagiarism machines. They don't talk about the low-wage workers in Hyderabad who spend ten hours a day labeling images of stop signs for pennies so a self-driving car can eventually ignore them. That’s not "impact." That’s just the supply chain.

By day two, the cynicism was terminal. The "Delhi Declaration" or whatever document they’re inevitably going to sign will be full of fluff about safety and cooperation. It won't mention the fact that every country in that room is currently trying to build a digital moat around their own borders. It won't mention that "open source" is becoming a buzzword used by companies that are losing the race to make the companies that are winning look like villains.

It was a show. A well-funded, air-conditioned, high-velocity show.

Outside the gates, the real India was doing what it always does—hustling, surviving, and ignoring the tech elite. People were using WhatsApp to run businesses and UPI to buy tea, completely indifferent to whether the code behind it was "sovereign" or not. They don't care about the summit. They care about whether the app works.

The suits eventually packed up their Tumi bags and headed back to the airport. They left behind a lot of promises and a significant carbon footprint. The big question isn't whether AI will change India. It’s whether India will realize that these "honchos" aren't bringing fire to humanity; they’re just looking for a new place to park their servers where the labor is cheap and the questions are few.

Who’s actually going to pay the bill for all this "impact" when the venture capital subsidies finally run dry?