A giant investment by AI to build a 70-acre AI research and innovation park for India. The project, which was unveiled during the India AI Impact Summit 2026, seeks to make Bengaluru the world hub for “Humanity-Centric” Artificial Intelligence. Headquartered in Bengaluru, Umakant Soni is at the helm of the ambitious initiative, which is touted as a “moonshot for humanity” which will develop safe, verifiable and grounded-in-the-real-world AI models.
The B1 AI Superpark is a City-size Vision
The first phase of this epic initiative will focus on the B1 AI Superpark, a high-tech campus in Sarjapura, Bengaluru. Infrastructure: The park is planned to be built up to approximately 500,000 square feet, eventually expanding to 4 million square feet of commercial R&D space.
- Talent Hub: Over 10,000 A.I. researchers and innovators will be hosted by the facility by end of 2026 and 25,000 engineers planned globally.
- Technical Power: Designed with speeds as high as 400 Gbps, the park will drive widespread experimentation with sub-millisecond latency.
Funding and Partnerships
The $650 million project is structured as a combination of $250 million of equity and $400 million in debt. Bharat1.AI has already locked together elite educational institutions and research centers to advance deep-tech breakthroughs like:
- IIT Kanpur (Airawat Research Foundation).
- IISc Bengaluru (SPARC).
- BITS Pilani and IIT Ropar.
- iSPIRT Foundation
Beyond Chatbots: Grounding AI in the Real World
The CEO Umakant Soni reiterated that the project mitigates one fundamental limitation for LLMs (large language models), that is they do not have a “real-world grounding”. "The risk we cannot bear is scaling systems without testing them in messy, real settings." The B1 AI Superpark is a step toward a city-scale validation framework that allows both agentic and physical AI to mature responsibly."
The park will act as laboratory for Agentic and Physical AI by training robots and autonomous systems using high-quality multimodal data. Significantly, the campus aims to be eco-friendly thanks to a fusion of solar power and small modular nuclear reactors.
Future Scope: The AI City by 2029
Over the next 36 months, Bharat1.AI hopes to expand this research park into a greater “AI City” living laboratory where Indian and global organizations can test AI systems under live circumstances. This “cognitive infrastructure” is intended to make sure that India isn't only a consumer of AI but is also responsible for setting its global safety standards.
