Why did NVIDIA's Jensen Huang miss AI Summit? South Asia MD clarifies

Dismissing all speculation over NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang's absence at the India AI Impact Summit, managing director for South Asia, Vishal Dhupar, has said he is unwell after weeks of extensive travel and has deputed Jay Puri to lead the company delegation at the event.

Commenting on Huang cancelling his visit to India just ahead of the Summit, Dhupar explained, "Jensen has travelled for three straight weeks; he caught a bug, he is under the weather."

Huang’s absence

Huang was among the most prominent global technology leaders expected at the India AI Impact Summit, and in the days leading up to the Summit, there was significant buzz around his participation at the mega event.

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"We hope he is well soon, but we are delighted that we have Jay Puri leading a delegation to come here in India and celebrate this very important week where the India AI impact summit will demonstrate the power of India," he said.

With some prominent tech faces, including NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, missing at the AI Summit, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Tuesday (February 17) said participation was a personal choice, while noting that the NVIDIA top boss had conveyed his inability to attend due to unavoidable reasons and deputed a senior executive to represent the company.

The India AI Impact Summit, one of the country's largest global gatherings on artificial intelligence, has brought together policymakers, industry leaders and technology experts, and deliberations are on around AI innovation, governance and real-world applications in New Delhi.

NVIDIA at AI Summit

The "exciting" week of India AI Summit brings innovation and opportunity, he pointed out.

"The activity schedule for this week reflects India's rapid growth as a global hub for AI talent. We are honoured to host the senior NVIDIA delegation led by executive vice president Jay Puri to celebrate our exceptional researchers, startups and developers who are building the nation's AI infrastructure," he said.

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Throughout the Summit, attendees can join 15 NVIDIA-hosted sessions covering everything from open models to agentic and physical AI, he said.

"Over 100 NVIDIA partners are here showcasing their latest work using AI infrastructure and open source models. This progress builds on decades of collaboration with India's technology leaders.

Investments in ‘five-layered cake’

The minister said NVIDIA is also working with Indian companies for some very large investments in AI infrastructure. "They are also working with some software companies for developing many use cases," the minister had added.

India, with its deep base of developers, startups and partners, has become one of the most important hubs for AI innovation, said Dhupar, while highlighting that the company was working closely with technology leaders across the country to accelerate transformation and supercharge growth.

Also read: Only PR or tangible benefit? Decoding the importance of AI Impact Summit

NVIDIA's diversity of partnerships is critical as AI is not a single product, nor a lone one-off breakthrough, he said, likening Artificial Intelligence to a five-layer cake spanning energy (as the base), with chips, infrastructure, models and applications on top. Each of the layers has its own diverse ecosystem, and NVIDIA is working with India's technology leaders at every single level of the stack, Dhupar said.

According to him, NVIDIA's ecosystem in India is thriving and growing fast.

Strategic partnerships

NVIDIA said it is collaborating with next-generation cloud providers Yotta, L&T and E2E Networks to deliver advanced AI factories to meet India's growing need for AI compute. Further, organisations across the country are building AI applications with NVIDIA 'Nemotron' to support public-sector services, financial systems and enterprise operations in multiple languages, it said.

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In India, adopters of Nemotron and NeMo Curator, an open library for multilingual and multimodal data curation, include BharatGen, Chariot, Commotion, Gnani.ai, CoRover.ai, National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), Sarvam.ai, Tech Mahindra, Zoho, among others.

"We are proud to be working with Indian visionaries at every single layer of this stack," Dhupar told reporters during a virtual briefing. Today, there are about 8,00,000 developers in India who are building, training and deploying AI solutions on NVIDIA's platforms.

"Our ecosystem, from startups to large enterprises, is working harder than ever to solve real-world challenges using advanced computing and generative AI. Together, we have a unique opportunity to accelerate progress in healthcare... industries and digital public infrastructure," he said.

As AI is built for India and for the world, one must understand that AI is not a single product or a lone breakthrough; it is an entire industrial system, Dhupar said, terming artificial intelligence as an essential infrastructure, just like electricity or the internet were to previous generations.