NEW DELHI, February 2026: Nvidia is expanding its footprint in India this week, launching a series of aggressive partnerships designed to capture artificial intelligence founders before they even formally incorporate their companies.
The Santa Clara-based chipmaker is shifting its strategy toward “inception investing,” aiming to build technical dependencies with developers at the earliest possible stage of the startup lifecycle.
The move signals a transition from a broad mentorship model to a deeply integrated engineering approach in one of the world’s most critical talent hubs.
At the heart of this push is a new collaboration with Activate, an early-stage venture firm led by Aakrit Vaish. The firm’s $75 million debut fund plans to back up to 30 AI startups, offering them preferential access to Nvidia’s specialized technical expertise.
The partnership aims to solve a historical gap in the market. While Nvidia’s presence in India has existed for years, it has often been characterized as a “light-touch” relationship compared to its deep involvement with Silicon Valley founders.
Nvidia, Securing the Compute Pipeline
By engaging with technical teams months before company formation, Nvidia is positioning itself to own the underlying infrastructure of India’s next generation of AI-native firms.
The logic is rooted in long-term scale. As these nascent startups grow, their consumption of AI compute typically follows an exponential curve, making early-stage loyalty a lucrative bet for the chipmaker.
The timing coincides with the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, an event that has drawn global leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to the Indian capital.
Nvidia’s Chief Executive Jensen Huang was scheduled to attend the summit but was forced to skip the trip due to unforeseen circumstances. In his absence, a high-level delegation led by Executive Vice President Jay Puri has been holding meetings with local researchers and developers.
Beyond the Activate deal, Nvidia is casting a wide net across the subcontinent. The company has secured new ties with major venture firms including Accel, Peak XV, and Elevation Capital to identify high-potential AI talent.
A separate initiative with the nonprofit AI Grants India aims to reach more than 10,000 early-stage founders over the next 12 months, providing them with the resources to build on Nvidia’s software stack.
Key Benefits for Indian Founders: Nvidia x Activate
| Category | Specific Support | Impact for Founders |
| Engineering | Direct access to Nvidia’s Solution Architects | Hands-on help co-building products and model optimization. |
| Advanced Tools | Access to Nemotron open models & training recipes | Faster development of sovereign, language-specific AI models. |
| Early Access | Pre-release access to new hardware and software | Ability to adjust product roadmaps before public launches. |
| Infrastructure | Preferred pricing on GPU clusters and Inception benefits | Significant reduction in the “compute tax” for early-stage teams. |
| Training | Deep Learning Institute (DLI) credits & technical workshops | Upskilling technical teams on CUDA and proprietary stacks. |
The aggressive outreach underscores an intensifying global competition to court Indian developers. With the country emerging as one of the largest pools of technical talent outside the United States, Nvidia is betting that winning the “Day Zero” founder is the key to maintaining its dominance in the global AI race.
