India Bets $1.1 Billion on AI as OpenAI, Anthropic Chiefs Pitch 250,000 Attendees

India Bets $1.1 Billion on AI as OpenAI, Anthropic Chiefs Pitch 250,000 Attendees

India unveiled a $1.1 billion state-backed venture fund for AI and advanced manufacturing startups this week as the country hosts a four-day summit designed to position itself as a global AI hub, drawing executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare to make their pitch.

The India AI Impact Summit, expecting 250,000 visitors through the week, represents the Modi government's most aggressive play yet to capture AI investment dollars that have largely flowed to the U.S. and China. For finance leaders watching global AI infrastructure bets, the event signals where the next wave of data center and compute spending may land—and which labor arbitrage models may be at risk.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told attendees that India now accounts for more than 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, second only to the United States, with Indian students representing the platform's largest educational user base globally. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse into ChatGPT's international penetration and suggests enterprise adoption in India may be tracking consumer usage patterns that preceded corporate deployments in Western markets.

The summit's deal flow started immediately. Blackstone acquired a majority stake in Indian AI startup Neysa as part of a $600 million equity raise, with Teachers' Venture Growth, TVS Capital, 360 ONE Asset, and Nexus Venture Partners joining the round. Neysa plans to raise another $600 million in debt and deploy more than 20,000 GPUs, a scale that would make it one of India's largest AI compute providers. Separately, Bengaluru-based C2i, which builds power solutions for data centers, raised $15 million in Series A funding from Peak XV, with participation from Yali Deeptech and TDK Ventures.

The infrastructure announcements come as India's traditional IT services sector confronts an existential question about AI's impact on its labor model. HCL CEO Vineet Nayyar told the summit that Indian IT companies will need to "focus on turning profits and not being job creators," a stark departure from an industry that has built its reputation on employment scale. The comments follow a decline in Indian IT stocks as investors price in disruption to the services sector.

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, escalated the warning, telling the Hindustan Times that industries like IT services and business process outsourcing "can almost completely disappear" within five years because of AI. He pointed to 250 million young Indians whose career paths may need to shift as automation reshapes the labor market that has anchored India's economic growth for two decades.

The summit's attendee list reads like a who's who of AI power brokers: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani, and Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis are all scheduled to appear. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to deliver a speech with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday, suggesting the event carries diplomatic weight beyond its commercial agenda.

For CFOs evaluating AI vendor strategies and offshore service contracts, the summit crystallizes a tension: India wants to be both the destination for AI infrastructure investment and the provider of AI-enabled services, even as its legacy IT services model faces compression. The $1.1 billion fund and Blackstone's $600 million bet suggest investors see the infrastructure play as more compelling than defending the labor arbitrage that built the previous generation of Indian tech giants.