The current $70 billion worth of investments in India's artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure may double during the upcoming IndiaAI Impact Summit to be held here next month, electronics and information technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Friday. Speaking at the curtain raiser event for the summit, Vaishnaw also said the second phase of the India AI mission will be rolled out in the next 5-6 months.

"So far, we have $70 billion of investments (in AI infrastructure) already on ground in the execution phase. The way we see enthusiasm, we shouldn't be surprised if this number doubles by the end of the summit," Vaishnaw said, hinting at big ticket investments potentially to be announced during the global gathering.

Global tech giants have pumped investments into building India's AI infrastructure from scratch as the country positions itself as a hub for designing the technology and applications for AI. This includes Google's $15 billion AI hub data centre in Visakhapatnam, $17.5 billion announced by Microsoft for cloud and AI expansion, $35 billion announced by Amazon for cloud and logistics by 2030), alongside contributions from domestic majors such as the Adani group ($5 billion) and Reliance Jio ($2 billion).

Pitching that the summit will be the largest so far globally, Vaishnaw said the deliberations aim to provide clear roadmaps on the 7 themes of the summit including safe and trusted AI, democratization of AI resources and AI for social good and economic growth.

He also stressed that India would need a bouquet of AI models, both large language models (LLMs) as well as small language models (SLMs) to meet the overall needs of the industry and country.

Significantly, the minister’s comments come a day after the Economic Survey 2025-26 warned against India's pursuit of costly frontier LLMs. Pursuing 'scale in AI for its own sake' is neither efficient nor necessary given the challenges of capacity, energy, and infrastructure, and India should aim for a bottom-up, multiple sector-specific approach to ensure it pays dividends, it said.

Currently, a host of startups and industry-academia consortia are in the race to develop the first indigenous foundational LLM, with significant financial support from the government. "The sovereign models are in very good shape. We should be launching them at the summit," Vaishnaw said. Meanwhile, in a recent meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, IT industry leaders and CEOs said they have made more than 200 small language models focussed on specific sectoral tasks, the minister said.

"India's IT companies are now providing AI solutions rather than the traditional focus on developing software," he said. He added there has been a 33% hiring jump in AI related activities.

Approved by the Union Cabinet in March 2024 with a Rs 10,371.92 crore budget, the IndiaAI Mission has so far secured 38,000 GPUs for a common compute program, funded AI startups, and created an open access database of AI resources. These moves towards democratizing AI access is something the world has taken note of, the minister said.

Vaishnaw also said the government plans to open AI labs in 500 universities, providing AI models to students to develop a strong pipeline of talent.