India held a multi-day AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week, drawing heads of state and senior representatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Microsoft, and Google.
The government's stated goal is to attract $200 billion in AI infrastructure investment over the next two years. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have already committed $70 billion toward AI and cloud infrastructure in the country.
OpenAI used the summit to announce a strategic partnership with Tata for a 100-megawatt data centre deal.
India is the second-largest market for ChatGPT globally and the largest source of student users on the platform, which makes the country strategically important for OpenAI beyond infrastructure alone.
The company's interest in embedding ChatGPT in Indian higher education has prompted concerns about what that dependency means for students' research habits and ability to verify information independently.
The summit also produced an observable moment of tension between the AI industry's two most prominent figures.
Sam Altman and Dario Amodei declined to share a stage and exchanged pointed comments publicly, with Anthropic taking aim at OpenAI's plans to introduce advertising for free ChatGPT users.
Against that backdrop of government enthusiasm and corporate investment, India's first AI IPO delivered a sobering result.
Fractal Analytics, which priced its offering at a valuation that reflected private market optimism about AI, struggled badly on its debut. Indian software stocks had already sold off significantly in the weeks before the listing.
The poor performance may reflect circumstances specific to Fractal Analytics rather than a generalised rejection of AI investment, but it also illustrates a gap that has shown up in other markets: public investors are applying more scrutiny to AI business models than private ones have been.