Emmanuel Macron just touched down in New Delhi. It’s hot, the air is thick with the usual February haze, and the French President is ready to talk about the only thing world leaders care about anymore: staying relevant while Silicon Valley eats their lunch. This isn't just another state visit with photo ops at the Taj Mahal. It’s a desperate attempt to figure out who gets to hold the leash on the next generation of code.

Modi was there to meet him, of course. The two of them have this practiced, high-gravity rapport. They call it a strategic partnership. In reality, it’s a marriage of convenience between a country that wants to be the world’s back office for intelligence and a country that thinks it can regulate its way to the top.

The AI Impact Summit is the stage. The players are the same ones we see at every Davos-lite gathering. But the vibe in Delhi is different. There’s a specific kind of friction here that you won't find in a Brussels committee room.

Macron is pitching "sovereign AI." It’s his favorite phrase lately. He wants a world where Europe and its allies don’t have to beg Microsoft for a seat at the table. He brought the heavy hitters from Mistral AI—the French darling that’s supposed to be the "OpenAI killer"—to show that Paris still has skin in the game. But here’s the rub: Mistral just signed a deal with Microsoft anyway. So much for sovereignty. It turns out even the most patriotic French code needs Azure’s servers to breathe.

India isn't interested in French philosophy. Modi’s government has its eyes on the "IndiaAI Mission," a $1.24 billion plan to build domestic compute power. That sounds like a lot of money until you realize it buys you about half a dozen high-end Nvidia clusters and maybe a few months of electricity. India has the data—billions of points of it, generated by a population that lives on WhatsApp and UPI—but it doesn’t have the chips.

That’s the trade-off no one wants to talk about on the main stage.

Macron wants "human-centric" guardrails. He wants the EU AI Act to be the global gold standard. He’s worried about deepfakes and the "moral fabric" of the internet. India, meanwhile, is looking at AI as a way to fix its broken infrastructure. They want models that can diagnose crop diseases in 22 different languages or sort through the mountainous backlog of the Indian judiciary. When you’re trying to move a billion people into the middle class, "algorithmic bias" feels like a luxury problem for people who drink $7 lattes.

There’s a specific tension over data localization, too. France wants to protect privacy. India wants to keep its data within its borders to train its own models. It’s a digital version of protectionism, and it’s getting messy. If Macron pushes too hard on the "Brussels effect" of heavy regulation, he risks alienating a partner that is more than happy to look toward a "build first, ask questions later" approach.

Then there’s the hardware. You can’t run a revolution on vibes. You need H100s. While Macron and Modi talk about "democratizing technology," they’re both ultimately subservient to a guy in a leather jacket in Santa Clara. The summit schedule is packed with panels on ethics and "inclusion," but the real deals are happening in the side rooms where the talk is about energy grids and sub-sea cables. AI is a thirsty beast. It needs water for cooling and coal for power. In a country like India, where the grid is already screaming, adding a massive sovereign AI stack isn't just a tech challenge. It’s a climate disaster waiting to happen.

The two leaders will likely walk away with a signed memorandum of understanding. It’ll be full of high-minded language about "bridging the digital divide" and "fostering innovation." They’ll take a selfie. They’ll tweet about a shared vision for the future of humanity.

But when the private jets leave the tarmac, the reality remains the same. France has the rules. India has the people. Neither of them has the GPUs.

It’s a nice dinner party. It’s just not clear who’s actually picking up the tab, or if the guest of honor—the actual technology—even bothered to show up.

After all, why would the models care about a summit in Delhi when they’re already busy learning how to replace the people writing the press releases?