Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister for Electronics and IT and Railways with S. Krishnan, Secretary IT during AI Impect Summit India 2026 (Pre Event), and others also seen, in New Delhi on Thursday.
| Photo Credit: SUSHIL KUMAR VERMA
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology will set up 500 AI Data Labs across the country, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Thursday. The labs will be located in a diverse set of districts, including in the North East, Mr. Vaishnaw said. The Minister was speaking at a pre-event for the AI Impact Summit to be hosted by India in February 2026. Additionally, an AI Governance Framework, based on a draft released earlier this year, will also be released in the coming days, he added.
On top of four startups selected for support by the IndiaAI Mission — which will benefit from the common compute facility, a pool of graphics processing units (GPUs) at a subsidised rate — 8 new projects were approved, the IT Ministry announced.
An IIT Bombay consortium called BombayGen is planning to create a suite of Indian language foundational large language models (LLMs) with over 1 trillion parameters; ₹988.6 crore in support will be given to this project. Fractal Analytics Ltd., a healthcare firm, will receive GPU access to train reasoning LLMs for better medical use cases. Other beneficiaries include Tech Mahindra, and startups like ZenteeIQ, Genloop, and NeuroDX.
Impact summit
At the AI Impact Summit, the government will invite top industry leaders and heads of governments, though Mr. Vaishnaw said that precise details on attendees would be released closer to the event. Mr. Vaishnaw said that the government hoped to unveil a foundational LLM — which is trained from scratch on data with Indian needs in mind, an expensive and technically challenging undertaking — by the time the summit was underway.
Published – September 18, 2025 11:12 pm IST
