India AI Summit: This Startup Wants to Build the World’s First AI City in Bengaluru

On the second day of the inaugural AI Impact Summit, which is being hosted in New Delhi, a very interesting announcement has emerged. A Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Bharat1, has laid out the plans to build the world's first “humanity-first” AI city in Bengaluru. While on the surface, the idea seems fantastical, the researchers are not really trying to have AI models run the entire city. Instead, they want to create a city-scale simulation where AI agents and physical AI can be stress tested in a real-world scenario.

Bharat1 Unveils Plans to Create an AI City

In a press release, the startup unveiled its vision to build a city-scale research and infrastructure initiative. Bharat1 highlighted that the deployment of increasingly capable AI systems has raised concerns about safety, reliability, and alignment. “While large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language and coding, intelligence built primarily on fragmented internet-scale data alone is unlikely to serve as a sufficient foundation for the next generation of autonomous and physical systems,” the post added.

For Bharat1, the solution to the problem is validated, real-world intelligence grounded in real-world data. For the first step of its moonshot project, the startup proposes a 5,00,000 sq ft AI research and innovation campus in Sarjapura, Bengaluru. The location will offer facilities, such as model training, fine-tuning and inference, plug-and-play labs, connectivity to AI cloud services, and more.

During this period, the startup wants to develop and stress-test universal basic intelligence frameworks in controlled, real-world conditions, building open city-scale world models using structured, high-quality multimodal data, and creating robust validation layers for agentic and physical AI systems before they are deployed at scale.

“We are at an inflexion point in the AI revolution. Intelligence is moving out of labs and into the fabric of society. Scaling systems without validating them in complex, real-world environments is a risk we cannot afford. The B1 AI Superpark is the first step toward creating a city-scale validation framework where agentic and physical AI can evolve responsibly, not just powerfully,” Umakant Soni, Co-Founder and CEO of Bharat1.AI, said at the AI Impact Summit.