The third week of February 2026 has become a historical pivot point for the technology industry. As the India AI Impact Summit reaches its penultimate day in New Delhi, the focus has shifted from “can AI do this?” to “how do we govern the agents that are already doing it?”
Here is your global tech briefing for today.
I. The New Delhi Summit: “AI for the Global South”
Today, Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the main plenary at Bharat Mandapam, surrounded by tech luminaries like Sundar Pichai, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei.
- The $100B Commitment: The summit has already cleared over $100 billion in investment pledges. The highlight is Google’s announcement of a $15 billion “Giga-AI Hub” in Vizag, which will serve as the primary compute center for the Global South.
- Sovereign AI (BharatGen): India officially launched BharatGen, its first sovereign text-to-speech and translation model. It natively supports 22+ Indian languages, aiming to bypass the “English-centric” bias of Western LLMs.
- DPI 2.0: A new “Digital Public Infrastructure” layer was unveiled, embedding autonomous voice agents into UPI and Aadhaar to assist semi-literate populations in accessing banking and government services.
II. The Agentic Economy: From Copilot to Autopilot
We have officially moved past the “chatbot” era. The industry term for February 2026 is “Agentic Autonomy.”
- OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 “Frontier”: Released earlier this week, GPT-5.3 includes a dedicated “Frontier” engine designed specifically to manage a fleet of sub-agents. It doesn’t just write code; it now handles debugging, cloud deployment, and security monitoring without human intervention.
- Claude 4.6 & The 1M Context: Anthropic’s new Claude Opus 4.6 has set a new standard with a 1-million-token context window, allowing it to “read” entire corporate libraries or multi-year legal histories in seconds to make autonomous decisions.
- Adoption Surge: Databricks reports that 66% of enterprises have moved from “testing” AI to deploying multi-agent architectures, with a 327% increase in autonomous agent usage since late 2025.
III. The $650 Billion Capex “Gamble”
While the technology is breakthrough, the “bill” is causing a minor panic on Wall Street.
- The Spending Spree: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have collectively committed $650 billion to capital expenditures for 2026—a 60% jump from last year. Most of this is flowing into NVIDIA Blackwell clusters and custom TPUs.
- Investor Anxiety: Despite the growth, Big Tech market caps took a collective $900 billion hit earlier this month as investors questioned if the “profit-per-watt” math is scaling as fast as the infrastructure.
- Energy Monopoly: A new friction point has emerged as Meta and Microsoft compete for “grid dominance,” often outbidding local municipalities for access to nuclear and hydroelectric power for their data centers.
📊 Tech Ecosystem Pulse: Feb 19, 2026
| Milestone | Entity | Status | Sentiment |
| GPT-5.3 Frontier | OpenAI | Live | High Hype (Agentic breakthrough) |
| America-India Cable | Commenced | Bullish (Strategic subsea infra) | |
| ISM 2.0 (Semis) | Govt. of India | ₹40,000 Cr | Bullish (Domestic 3nm focus) |
| Vision Pro 3 | Apple | Rumored | Curious (Focus on “Weightless” AR) |
IV. Semiconductors: ISM 2.0 & The 3nm Goal
The India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) 2.0 is now in high gear.
- Indigenization: The focus has shifted from simple assembly (ATMP) to Commercial Fabrication.
- Supply Chain Security: To reduce “upstream” risk, India is investing heavily in domestic production of specialty gases and ultrapure water, targeting a 75% self-sufficiency in the semiconductor supply chain by 2029.