India strongly positioned itself in global AI landscape, says Bharti Chairman Sunil Mittal

New Delhi: India has made a very strong position for itself on the AI world landscape by hosting the first AI summit for the global south, Bharti Enterprises Founder and Chairman Sunil Mittal said on Wednesday.

On the sidelines of India AI Impact Summit 2026, Mittal said that Airtel is leading in AI space with initiatives around sovereign cloud.

“I would say this is one of the most powerful summits that have been held anywhere in the globe. This is the fourth artificial intelligence summit and it’s been actually absolutely stunning. Even the world leaders including President Macron acknowledged that, who were the host of the previous summit. So, I think India has made a very strong position for itself on the AI world landscape,” Mittal said.

Bharti Airtel is one of the prominent telecom operators with presence in several countries in the global south including India and 14 African countries.

The company is now betting big on expanding its data centres. When asked about his view on sovereign AI technology, he said, “Airtel is leading on the initiative for sovereign cloud. Airtel plans to augment data centre capacity and

connectivity.

“The company has set a target to double its market share in the segment to 25 per cent and expand data centre capacity from around 120 megawatt to 1 gigawatt capacity in the next three to four years.”

Google has earmarked an investment of $15 billion to set up data centres with similar capacity by 2030.