French President Emmanuel Macron used the global stage of the India AI Impact Summit 2026 to deliver a strong endorsement of India’s digital transformation while urging nations to shape artificial intelligence through sovereign strategy and responsible oversight.

From Mumbai street vendor to digital statecraft

Opening his keynote with a “namaste”, Macron framed India’s digital public infrastructure as a “civilisational achievement.” He began with the story of a Mumbai street vendor who, a decade ago, could not open a bank account. “No address, no papers, no access. Today, the same vendor accepts payments on his phone,” he said.

India, he added, “built something that no other country has built — a digital identity for 1.4 billion people.” He cited the scale of India’s digital rails: a payments system processing 20 billion transactions a month, 500 million digital health IDs issued, and what he called the “India Stack Open Interoperable Sovereign” framework. “Here are the results… We are clearly at the beginning of a huge acceleration,” he said.

AI, chips and the geopolitics of compute

Macron positioned these achievements as foundational for the AI era. Artificial intelligence, he warned, has become a domain of strategic competition. “AI, GPU, chips are now directly translated in geopolitical and macroeconomic terms — sometimes for the best, sometimes for the worst,” he said, signalling how compute power is increasingly tied to national strength.

Referring to the AI Action Summit co-hosted by France and India in Paris last year, Macron said both countries had committed to principles that combine innovation with responsibility. “AI will disrupt healthcare, energy, mobility, agriculture and public services for the good of mankind,” he said. “The future of AI will be built by those who combine innovation and responsibility, technology with humanity.”

Small language models and sovereign AI bets

He highlighted India’s “deliberate sovereign choice” to invest in small language models (SMLs) designed for task-specific use and smartphone deployment, contrasting it with Europe’s focus on large-scale models. “India built the first government-funded AI and deployed 38,000 GPUs at the cheapest rates to every startup in the country,” he noted.

At the same time, Macron underscored Europe’s positioning. “Europe is not blindly focused on regulation — Europe is a space for innovation and investment, but it is a safe space,” he said, adding that France was doubling the number of AI scientists and engineers it trains, with more than 11 AI startups already generating jobs.

Talent, trust and tech sovereignty

India’s own human capital, he observed, is formidable. “India trains hundreds of thousands of AI engineers every year… with 500,000 engineers, India is the second largest developer community in the world.”

Macron also delivered a cautionary note: “No country should be reduced to merely serving as a market for foreign players to sell their AI models and extract citizens’ data.” Big tech firms, he said, must “play a responsible game.”

Closing with a return to the Mumbai vendor anecdote, Macron rejected the idea that AI is “a game only the biggest can play.” India, France and Europe, he said, can shape a different model. “India proved the world wrong once. Together, we will help shape the future of AI.”