BRICS leaders put artificial intelligence and startup cooperation at the center of a new innovation agenda in New Delhi on Sunday, giving India a platform to push deeper technology ties among some of the world’s largest emerging economies while proposing new mechanisms for startup financing, incubation and AI governance.

The technology commitments emerged from the 18th BRICS Summit, hosted by India on September 12 and 13. The group’s New Delhi Declaration describes artificial intelligence as an important potential driver of economic growth and sustainable development and calls for international cooperation that expands access to AI resources while addressing safety, security, inclusiveness and reliability.

The declaration also commits members to implementing the BRICS Leaders’ Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence. The language emphasizes trustworthy AI, greater use of the technology for science and social benefit, improved energy efficiency and measures to mitigate risks. India’s February 2026 AI Impact Summit and China’s World AI Conference in Shanghai were both cited as contributions to wider international cooperation.

For Silicon Valley, the significance lies less in any single initiative than in the scale of the markets involved. BRICS has expanded to 11 members — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Indian officials have said the member economies account for about half of the world’s population and roughly 40% of global economic output.

That gives the bloc potential influence over the conditions under which artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, financial technology and other digital services are deployed across emerging markets. U.S. technology companies already operate extensively in several BRICS economies, particularly India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Greater coordination among those markets could eventually affect technology standards, data practices, intellectual-property policies and the commercial pathways available to American companies.

Startups were another major part of the summit’s technology push. Leaders welcomed the creation of a BRICS Incubator Network intended to strengthen connections among entrepreneurs, incubators and national innovation systems. They also agreed to continue considering a BRICS Startup Innovation Fund that could become a financing mechanism for young technology companies operating across the member states.

The distinction is important: the incubator network has been welcomed as an established initiative, but the startup fund remains a proposal under consideration. No final capitalization, investment mandate or deployment timetable was announced in the summit materials reviewed for the initiative. That means its potential competitive impact on established venture-capital markets cannot yet be measured.

India nevertheless used the summit to demonstrate how it wants that cross-border startup ecosystem to work. The government organized the BRICS Bharat Innovates Exposition alongside summit events at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, bringing 37 Indian deep-tech ventures into contact with corporate executives, investors, incubators and government delegations from BRICS economies.

India’s Ministry of Education described the exposition as a platform for business-to-business meetings, investment discussions, technology partnerships and international market access. The participating companies represented areas including artificial intelligence, health technology, quantum computing, space systems, advanced manufacturing and other deep-tech fields.

The program reflects a broader Indian strategy of linking universities, research laboratories and startups with international investors and commercial partners. It also provides India with a way to position itself as a bridge between large technology markets and emerging economies seeking alternatives to relying exclusively on U.S., European or Chinese innovation networks.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had already urged the BRICS business community to expand startup connections before the leaders’ summit. At the BRICS Business Forum on September 11, he proposed an annual goal of helping 100 BRICS startups scale into other member markets and called for more business partnerships across the bloc.

The summit declaration goes further by placing startup collaboration inside the BRICS Partnership on the New Industrial Revolution, or PartNIR, which covers industrial modernization and technologies associated with Industry 4.0. The document also supports the BRICS Startup Knowledge Hub and Startup Forum as channels for sharing information and connecting entrepreneurs.

Artificial intelligence policy is likely to be watched especially closely in the United States. Washington, Brussels, Beijing, New Delhi and other governments are pursuing different combinations of AI investment, safety oversight and industrial policy. BRICS does not currently represent a unified regulatory regime comparable to the European Union, and member countries have very different laws and strategic interests. Still, common statements on AI governance can give members additional influence in international negotiations over standards and responsible deployment.

Intellectual property is another area where the declaration could intersect with debates involving U.S. AI developers. BRICS leaders called for cooperation to promote respect for intellectual-property rights in digital environments, including rights connected with AI training. They also referred to fair remuneration for rights holders and concerns about the misappropriation or misrepresentation of knowledge, heritage and cultural values in training data.

Those questions are already central to lawsuits and policy debates in the United States, where technology companies, publishers, authors and other rights holders are contesting how copyrighted material may be used to train generative AI systems. The BRICS language does not establish new international rules, but it illustrates how training-data governance is becoming a global policy issue rather than one confined to U.S. and European courts.

The technology agenda also overlaps with concerns about supply-chain resilience. Modi warned during the summit that the weaponization of technology and critical minerals could obstruct shared development. BRICS discussions included semiconductors, industrial cooperation and resilient supply chains, issues that have also become priorities for Washington as competition intensifies over chips, advanced manufacturing and strategic materials.

For American investors, one question is whether BRICS initiatives can create meaningful new sources of risk capital. India has already expanded domestic support for technology entrepreneurship, including a second Startup India Fund of Funds with a 10,000-crore-rupee corpus focused partly on deep technology and innovative manufacturing. A separate BRICS-level fund, if ultimately established, could add another channel for startups seeking to scale across developing markets.

The summit also considered financial infrastructure that could support technology investment, including discussions around a proposed BRICS Risk Lab at India’s GIFT City financial center and continued work on investment and guarantee mechanisms. Such initiatives remain separate from the startup fund itself, but they fit India’s broader effort to connect technological development with new sources of capital.

Much now depends on implementation. The New Delhi summit produced a framework for cooperation, not a common BRICS technology market. Members still differ significantly on investment rules, digital regulation, geopolitical alignment and relations with the United States. Turning summit language into operating funds, interoperable startup programs or common AI governance practices will require further negotiations.

Even so, the direction is becoming clearer. India is using its BRICS chairship to make innovation, AI and entrepreneurship part of the bloc’s economic identity. For Silicon Valley companies, founders and investors, the emerging BRICS technology architecture represents another international network to monitor as capital, technical talent and AI policymaking become increasingly distributed across multiple global centers.