As per a statement from the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates will not be delivering keynote address at India AI Summit 2026, and instead the Gates Foundation will be represented by President of Africa and India Offices - Ankur Vora.
Source: Gates Foundation
Galgotias University was accused of showcasing commercial robot (Unitree Go2 robot) as built by the university, at Delhi AI Summit. They put out a statement after the dispute.
Now reports are coming in that they have been asked to vacate the AI Impact Summit.
Source: ANI
The South Goa consumer disputes redressal commission issued a bailable warrant against Ola Electric Technologies Pvt Ltd founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal for failing to remain present before the commission despite being given prior notice.
The commission directed Bengaluru police to arrest him and produce him before the commission in Margao on Feb 23 at 10.30am. He can be released on bail of Rs 1.47 lakh, said president of the commission Sanjay Chodankar in the order.
The commission issued a notice to Aggarwal, directing him to personally remain present on Feb 4 for clarification on the whereabouts of the complainant’s bike and to explain why it was not repaired and delivered to him after considerable time. However, he failed to remain present.
The complainant said that he communicated the errors and manufacturing defects to the company, but there was no response. After repeated complaints at the store in Mormugao, he then took the scooter to the company showroom. His complaint stated that the company rectified the defect of the brand-new scooter, estimated at Rs 18,627, and handed it over to him. He stated that thereafter the problem persisted, besides another issue regarding bluetooth connectivity.
He stated that the scooter is in the custody of the company and he is seeking a refund of the entire Rs 1.47 lakh, along with Rs 50,000 as compensation in lieu of loss of value of money, harassment, mental pain, and agony suffered by him.
Source: TOI
Three companies make essentially all hard drives on earth: Western Digital (42% market share), Seagate (40%), and Toshiba (18%). When WD CEO Irving Tan says they're "pretty much sold out for calendar 2026" with "firm purchase orders from top seven customers" and long-term agreements extending to 2028, he's describing nearly half the global supply being locked up.
Lead times for enterprise nearline drives have gone from a few weeks to over 52 weeks. HDD average selling prices are at their highest point since 1998. And this is happening despite total exabyte shipments hitting records: WD alone shipped 215 EB in the most recent quarter, up 22% year over year. The drives are moving faster than ever and still can't keep up.
Why now? Hyperscaler capital expenditure for 2026 is approaching $700 billion. Amazon announced $200 billion in capex, the largest single-company infrastructure spend in history. Google guided $175-185B (up 140% from 2025). Meta guided $115-135B. About 75% of all of this goes to AI infrastructure: GPUs, servers, and the storage to feed them.
SSDs can't absorb the overflow. Enterprise SSD prices (30TB TLC drives) surged 257% in nine months, from about $3,000 to nearly $11,000. HDDs went up only 35% in the same period. The cost ratio between SSDs and HDDs per terabyte widened from 6.2x to 16.4x. Micron's 2026 enterprise NAND supply is already "fully committed." So even companies that would prefer SSDs are buying hard drives because that's what's available at a price that doesn't break the budget.
The technology bottleneck compounds this. Seagate is the only company shipping HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording) drives right now, their Mozaic 3 platform at 30TB per drive. The next step, 40TB drives using Mozaic 4 , starts volume production in the first half of 2026. Western Digital delayed its HAMR entry to the second half of 2026, citing prohibitive per-unit costs at low volume. HAMR requires a fundamentally different manufacturing process: iron-platinum media, glass substrates instead of aluminum, and a near-field transducer laser integrated into every read/write head. You can't just flip a switch and double capacity.
The comparison that keeps coming up is Chia coin in 2021, when cryptocurrency miners panic-bought hard drives and the network storage grew from 600 petabytes to 10 exabytes in a single month. Prices spiked and crashed when the speculation ended. The difference here is that the buyers are Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle, with purchase orders running through 2028, building physical data centers (Meta's Hyperion project in Louisiana: 5 GW capacity, $27 billion; the Stargate project in Texas: 7 GW planned, $400 billion ). This isn't speculative hoarding. The demand is structural, funded by $121 billion in new debt issuance in 2025 alone.
WD saw this coming. They spun off their flash/SSD business into SanDisk Corporation in February 2025, making Western Digital a pure-play hard drive company for the first time. Seagate's FY2025 revenue hit $9.1 billion (up 30%), with net profit jumping from $335 million to $1.47 billion. WD's most recent quarter was $3.02 billion in revenue, with gross margins at 43.9%. These companies are printing money right now.
The overcapacity question is real though. Morgan Stanley and others have warned about an AI infrastructure bubble. Grid interconnection delays average 7 years. The enterprise software sector has lost about $2 trillion in market cap since late January 2026 on fears AI will cannibalize existing products. The Magnificent Six lost over $1.35 trillion in a single week in early February. Everyone agrees AI is transformative. The question is whether $700 billion a year in spending will generate returns before the debt comes due.
India's cabinet has approved projects worth about 1.6 trillion rupees ($18 billion) for infrastructure, urban development and startups, Information Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Saturday.
Key highlights:
New industrial smart cities
Major expansion in urban transit
Enhanced funding for deep-tech startups.
Source: Reuters
Alibaba.com India, in collaboration with Startup India (DPIIT), presents the Alibaba.com Global Export Enablement Challenge!
This week, the Indian government’s Startup India initiative announced the collaboration with Alibaba.com to identify and support Indian startups that can help onboard and scale Indian exporters on the group’s global B2B platform. The program offers commissions and technical support to those startups to assist small manufacturers and traders in reaching overseas markets.
India’s export ambitions are closely tied to its small businesses and the platforms they use to reach overseas markets. Micro, small, and medium enterprises account for nearly half of the country’s exports and about 31% of GDP, according to the Indian government’s latest Economic Survey, underlining why New Delhi has focused on expanding digital market access for smaller firms through global B2B channels, including Alibaba.com.
Alibaba.com’s B2B platform connects more than 50 million active buyers across over 200 countries and regions, said Rocky Lu, head of India business at the company.
“Alibaba.com has been active in India for over two decades, and we remain dedicated to our core mission of empowering MSMEs to scale their businesses globally,” Lu told TechCrunch. “Our focus continues to be on leveraging our digital infrastructure to help ‘Made in India’ products reach an international audience through digital transformation.”
Source: TechCrunch
Walmart-owned ecommerce major may pilot in Bengaluru by mid-2026, weighing standalone app versus ONDC route as Zomato and Swiggy dominate the market.
The move would pitch the Walmart-owned ecommerce major directly against Zomato and Swiggy in a market estimated at $9 billion in FY25 and projected to grow to $25 billion by FY30, according to Jefferies. For Flipkart, the stakes go beyond food — it is preparing for a public listing and is seeking new growth engines.
Flipkart had previously explored entering food delivery through ONDC about two years ago, alongside peers such as Ola and Paytm, but that plan did not move beyond initial discussions.
India’s food delivery market has sharply consolidated over the past few years. Zomato and Swiggy dominate the space after a series of exits by smaller players. Outside India and China, brokerages note, most major markets have stabilised into three or four operators, often led by a single dominant player.
Source: Money Control
The government has rolled out new rules for AI content, banning illegal and harmful material while requiring clear labelling and traceable identifiers to curb misuse.
Companies are required to ensure that they do not permit the creation, publishing, or dissemination of AI-generated content that is barred under BNS, POCSO, or other laws.
Under the rules, companies are barred from permitting AI-generated content involving child sexual abuse, or material that is obscene, vulgar, or sexually explicit. They must also prevent the creation of false documents and the development or generation of explosives.
The rules mandate that AI-generated content be clearly and prominently labelled, with the label easily noticeable and adequately perceivable. Companies must also embed a unique identifier to trace the computer resource used to create, generate, or modify such content, and must not allow the AI label to be removed or altered.
Source: CNBC
Government to launch facility soon with aim to boost renewable energy
The govt is set to launch a facility that will allow consumers to directly buy and sell electricity among themselves, with the amount adjusted in their monthly power bills.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading under the India Energy Stack (IES) will enable electricity consumers and prosumers — consumers who also generate power through renewable sources such as rooftop solar — to trade surplus renewable energy directly with other consumers, including across state boundaries. The transactions will be facilitated through a trust-based digital framework to ensure a secure, verifiable and scalable P2P energy network.
While the buyer will need a smart electricity meter, the seller must have a rooftop solar plant and a net meter to trade surplus energy. The two parties will be able to negotiate prices through a mobile application and complete the transaction. Officials said consumers will continue to receive their regular electricity bills and P2P energy trades will be reflected as cumulative adjustments within the discom billing system for both buyers and sellers. They added that the system will help prosumers easily sell surplus electricity, while buyers will get power at rates cheaper than those charged by distribution companies.
Source: TOI
Deep tech startups in sectors such as space, semiconductors, and biotech take far longer to mature than conventional ventures. Because of that India is adjusting its startup rules, and mobilizing public capital, hoping to help more of them make it to commercial products.
This week, the Indian government updated its startup framework, doubling the period for which deep tech companies are treated as startups to 20 years and raising the revenue threshold for startup-specific tax, grant, and regulatory benefits to ₹3 billion (about $33.12 million), from ₹1 billion (around $11.04 million) previously. The change aims to align policy timelines with the long development cycles typical of science- and engineering-led businesses.
The change also forms part of New Delhi’s effort to build a long-horizon deep tech ecosystem by combining regulatory reform with public capital, including the ₹1 trillion (around $11 billion) Research, Development and Innovation Fund (RDI), announced last year. That fund is intended to expand patient financing for science-led and R&D-driven companies. Against that backdrop, U.S. and Indian venture firms later came together to launch the India Deep Tech Alliance, $1 billion-plus private investor coalition that includes Accel, Blume Ventures, Celesta Capital, Premji Invest, Ideaspring Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Kalaari Capital, with chipmaker Nvidia acting as an adviser.
For founders, these changes may fix what some see as an artificial pressure point. Under the previous framework, companies often risked losing startup status while still pre-commercial, creating a “false failure signal” that judged science-led ventures on policy timelines rather than technological progress, said Vishesh Rajaram, founding partner at Speciale Invest, an Indian deep tech venture capital firm.
More details on TechCrunch
Gurugram police have arrested Dhruv Dutt Sharma, director of 32nd Milestone. He is accused of defrauding around Rs 500 crore. Sharma allegedly sold a single building floor to more than 25 individuals.
Source: ETimes
