This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, February 18th, 2026.

We tell you what you need to know, give you some important context, and gosh darn it, help each other understand.

Today, India makes a play to become the center of AI for the global south.

Go India. I'm Tom Merritt.

And I'm Sarah Lane. Let's start with what you need to know with the big story all right so there is a big old ai summit happening in new delhi a i summit twenty 26 going on through february 20th uh this is i believe the fourth AI summit. There was one in Paris last year.

Before that, there was one in Seoul and then one in London. I think that was the first one.

And they have all previously focused on AI safety. Now, there's a lot of safety stuff going on at this one in India.

But the India Summit is more focused on bringing infrastructure and investment and

startups to the global south.

So let's run through some of the big news coming out of there.

Alphabet announced the America India Connect initiative to build new undersea fiber optic cables between the U.S.

India and other countries.

The idea there is to improve speed and reliability.

If you don't remember, like, Alphabet is the parent company of Google.

So this is basically Google doing that.

Open AI announced a partnership with six Indian education institutions

to provide access to Chet GPT, EDU, the educational version of chat GPT. That'll include IIT Delhi,

IIM-Ochmenabad, AIMS New Delhi, and should serve about 100,000 students.

Microsoft's going to throw down $50 billion on infrastructure in the global south, not just India, by 2030.

It spent $17.5 billion on data infrastructure in India last year.

So this is in addition to that.

NVIDIA plans to work with Indian venture capital companies, including PeakXV, Excel, India,

...