NEW DELHI – The massive AI summit in India this week looked, on the surface, like a familiar spectacle: world leaders and technology executives converging in New Delhi, headline-grabbing investment numbers, and carefully worded joint statements. It was the largest global AI summit to date, and the first hosted in the Global South.

I was on the ground through the summit’s closed-door sessions, bilateral events, and formal signings. While most coverage focused on press releases and piecemeal deal announcements, something far more strategic was unfolding.

FILE-U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi shake hands before their meeting at Hyderabad House, Feb. 25, 2020, in New Delhi, India. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, file) (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, file / AP Newsroom)

In the span of a few days, the United States quietly assembled a full playbook for the Global South—how emerging economies adopt artificial intelligence, how that adoption is financed, how it is secured. The United States paired AI diffusion with supply-chain security and anchored both in India, signaling a shift in how it intends to project technological leadership at a moment when domestic politics are pulling inward. This system has two parts.

The first is the supply chain and critical resources side with Pax Silica. U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg, U.S. Ambassador to India Sergio Gor, and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios all showed up in New Delhi to sign an agreement welcoming India into the Pax Silica. The declaration formalizes cooperation across critical minerals, semiconductor manufacturing, energy, and data-center infrastructure, explicitly tying economic resilience to national security.

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Helberg framed the effort as a response to what he called “weaponized dependency,” arguing on stage that “economic security is national security” and that sovereignty in the modern era comes from the ability to build—”from minerals deep in the earth to silicon wafers to the intelligence that powers AI systems.” Ambassador Gor followed by stating plainly that India’s participation was “not symbolic” but “strategic and essential,” linking the initiative directly to broader U.S.–India trade, technology, and defense coordination. The language was unusually direct.

The second arm came moments later, in a press conference that received comparatively little attention. Director Kratsios outlined a new AI exports stack, what amounts to a new phase of U.S. AI policy: a coordinated effort to export the American AI ecosystem at scale, supported by financing, standards-setting, and deployment assistance. “We want to share the great American technology stack with the world,” he said, emphasizing that leadership in AI will be determined not only by who invents, but by whose systems are adopted widely enough to become defaults.

That framing helps explain why this was launched in New Delhi and not Washington. India designed the summit around adoption rather than abstraction, with leaders from the Global South, frontier AI firms, and multilateral lenders present by design. Indian officials emphasized execution constraints and sovereignty rather than values alignment. IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw focused on semiconductor talent shortages, noting that the global industry will require “roughly one million additional skilled professionals” and that India is addressing this through nationwide programs spanning hundreds of universities, alongside free access to advanced chip-design tools from firms such as Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens.

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All U.S. officials present highlighted India’s role as critical. Most emerging economies plug into a single link of the technology value chain: minerals, low-cost assembly, or consumption. India operates across the stack. U.S. officials repeatedly emphasized that India brings scale in engineering talent, active participation in advanced chip design, a growing domestic AI product ecosystem, population-level deployment potential and the capacity to absorb large-scale infrastructure investment in data centers and energy. That makes India not just a market, but a stabilizing node—both for AI diffusion and for diversifying supply chains that have become increasingly concentrated.

The summit underscored a problem in the Global South that Washington has often avoided stating directly. Artificial intelligence is no longer a standalone sector. It is an infrastructure layer of the future economy. Infrastructure requires secure inputs, energy, standards, skilled labor, and sustained capital. Countries that cannot deploy AI at scale will have little influence over how it is governed. They will inherit systems designed elsewhere. Regulation without participation offers neither sovereignty nor stability.

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The U.S. response outlined in New Delhi reflects a recognition of that reality. The American AI ecosystem is being positioned as a foundation others can build on, rather than a closed platform they must rent. Financing tools across multiple agencies—including the U.S. Development Finance Corporation and Export-Import Bank—are being aligned to lower adoption barriers. Partner-country firms are being integrated and cross-sold in the system rather than excluded from it. Standards, particularly for next-generation AI agents, are being shaped early, with Kratsios noting that interoperability will determine whether AI scales smoothly or fragments.

Pax Silica and the AI export program – these two tracks are meant to move together, forming a loop between capability and resilience.

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It was clear from over $250 billion in AI deals announced in New Delhi that markets appear to recognize the direction of travel. Microsoft has committed to invest approximately $50 billion in AI infrastructure across the Global South by the end of the decade. OpenAI and AMD announced partnerships with India’s Tata Group tied to AI infrastructure and deployment. Blackstone participated in a $600 million raise for Indian AI infrastructure firm Neysa, while Nvidia expanded its venture partnerships across India. Indian conglomerates Reliance and Adani separately outlined large-scale data-center investments measured in multiple gigawatts of capacity.

As domestic politics in the United States become more consuming ahead of the midterms, the White House is clearly moving to lock in a parallel agenda abroad—one that does not depend on legislative cycles or headline battles at home. The Global South, where AI adoption will determine growth trajectories and political alignment for decades, is now central to that effort. The United States is no longer relying on innovation alone to sustain technological leadership. It is constructing an adoption architecture, securing its physical foundations, and extending both outward at a moment when the US moves to an inward focus.

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