India set to pitch tech synergy for cementing BRICS

India will push for closer research ties and greater government-to-government partnership across artificial intelligence, advanced computing, quantum technologies and semiconductor materials at the upcoming BRICS summit, officials said. The focus on these frontier technologies comes at a time when nations seek to counter growing AI monopolies and de-risk global semiconductor supply chains.

India is keen to complete three major multilateral projects under its chairmanship of the 11-country bloc.

The global research advanced infrastructure network (GRAIN) initiative will offer researchers from member states federated, or shared, access to high-performance computing systems and supercomputers, an official said. “Work is ongoing to operationalise the science and research repository, a unified digital portal where member nations share datasets and capabilities specifically targeting advanced materials engineering and functional nanostructures,” the person added.


Connecting chip design and deeptech startups across members via the proposed Startup Innovation Fund and Incubator Network is another target area. “In all these areas, we have aimed to mirror the success of our domestic policies,” another official said. “Other nations are keen to establish frameworks similar to AIkosh — our national, centralised platform for non-personal datasets — and AI models, or our onboarding of over 38,000 high-performance graphics processing units in our common AI compute facility under the IndiaAI Mission.”

The event — only the second summit featuring the 10 new partner nations, including Malaysia, Nigeria and Vietnam — will have a major focus on ramping up cooperation in digital payments systems.

Call for Ethical AI

Multiple nations have expressed interest in onboarding India’s digital public infrastructure stack of technology, and announcements regarding this are expected at the summit, said officials.

Technology has become a focal point across BRICS fora since India last held chairmanship of the grouping in 2021, when it convened the heads of space agencies to sign the agreement on the Remote Sensing Satellite Constellation, and got countries to advance cooperation in climate research.

The two-day meet will see India further strengthen a shared BRICS policy framework focused on responsible, ethical and human-centric AI development. This will aim to address challenges around AI safety, bias mitigation, cybersecurity and data protection, officials said. Barring South Africa, all other BRICS nations signed the New Delhi Declaration on safe, ethical and democratic AI during the February IndiaAI Impact Summit.

The work programmes for tech domains have been driven by greater collaborations among members, and are being drawn up by individual working groups on high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, photonics, materials science and nanotechnology, and solid state lighting.

The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing earlier this year held a pre-summit meeting to establish cooperation in AI-led materials discovery. This initiative aims to bring members closer to leveraging predictive machine learning, materials informatics and automated synthesis to accelerate discovery of next-generation materials for clean energy, aerospace and electronics.