India's sovereign AI model to be ready by February 2026: Meity Secretary

India's sovereign artificial intelligence model will be ready before the AI Impact Summit to be held in February, a top IT ministry official said on Friday.

Speaking at India Mobile Congress 2025, Electronics and IT Secretary S Krishnan said that though India was a latecomer in AI, it has scaled up its compute infrastructure rapidly with the deployment of 38,000 GPU (graphics processing units) against the target of 10,000 units and building up its own foundational models.

"Before the end of this year, hopefully, we should have our first foundational model, India, entirely an Indian foundational model. By the time of the India AI Summit, we should be able to launch India's sovereign model as well," Krishnan said.

The government has scheduled a two-day India AI Impact Summit 2026 on February 19 and February 20, 2026.

Krishnan said that the government is concerned about the impact AI can have and is looking to develop inclusive platforms.

"I think the other important element of what we are targeting is a lot of smaller models which are sector specific, because ultimately the delivery has to be, in the Indian context, something which is meaningful and enhances productivity. Something which delivers to people who most need it in the sectors where AI has to make a difference," Krishnan said.

He said that the government is continuously enhancing the computing infrastructure and will soon make more GPUs available for Indian firms.

Speaking on the sidelines of the event, Krishnan said the addition of a new GPU is being done through an open process every quarter.

"We continue to call for bids from time to time, and practically every quarter we have bids, we have a bid out right now. People are adding capacity, as they add capacity, we continue to add the GPUs which are offered," he said.

When asked about the government's progress in the development of an indigenous GPU, Krishan said that it will be one of the crucial goals of the government under India Semiconductor Mission 2.0, which is under discussion at present.

Ministry of Electronics and Additional Secretary Abhishek Singh said India's sovereign AI model will be completely trained on Indian data sets and will be hosted on Indian servers.

He said that the government is supporting 12 domestic firms and expects two of them to have their foundational model ready by the end of the year.