IBM India hosted the IBM Think 2026 conference in Mumbai today wherein the company announced a partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). With this partnership, IBM and MeitY aim to transform India’s deep tech startup ecosystem. It also announced Bharat Core at the event.
IBM collaborates with MeitY
As mentioned before, IBM and MeitY signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) at the company’s IBM Think 2026 conference today. As a part of this partnership, MeitY Startup Hub (MSH) will work with IBM to give high potential deep tech startups in India access to IBM’s portfolio of enterprise technologies and innovation platforms to solve business use cases.
The company said that select deep tech startup will get access to its enterprise AI, hybrid cloud and quantum computing expertise in a bid to enable them to build, validate and scale technologies for India and global markets. IBM will also provide technical guidance and enablement on technologies such as IBM watsonx, IBM Bob, IBM Sovereign Core, IBM’s hybrid cloud, quantum computing, and security and automation solutions.
For the unversed, watsonX is the company enterprise ready AI and data platform that is designed to help companies build, train, deploy and govern AI models at a large scale. Similarly, IBM Bob is an AI coding agent for enterprises that automates the full software development lifecycle; while IBM Sovereign Core is an AI-ready, sovereign-by-design software stack that lets enterprises, governments, and service providers run and manage secure digital environments and AI workloads under their own complete control.
IBM said that as a part of the MoU, it will jointly work with MSH to explore initiatives that support startups across multiple stages of growth and across sectors including banking, finance, government and industrial. Furthermore, the collaboration will focus on enterprise proof of concepts (PoCs), sovereign AI innovation, open-source ecosystem development, founder mentorship, technical skilling and opportunities for startups to showcase their solutions to enterprises and investors.
IBM announces Bharat Core
In addition to announcing partnership with MeitY, IBM also announced Bharat Core, which aims to help companies build Sovereign AI at a scale for India.
The company said that Bharat Core sits on top of IBM Sovereign Core, which the company announced back in January this year, and that it’s an optimised AI stack for India. Simply put, Bharat Core is a version of Sovereign Core that has been optimised for the Indian context. The company says that it guides users across the AI lifecycle by recommending the right building blocks and infrastructure.
IBM India MD pushes for Digital Swaraj
At the Think 2026 conference, the Sandip Patel, who is the Managing Director of IBM India and South Asia, also made a strong pitch for what he described as ‘Digital Swaraj’. Digital Swaraj, as Patel described, includes not just storing data locally but also having control over it.
“As AI and all of these innovations [AI and post-quantum cryptography], move to the core of the enterprise. Who remains in control?…What happens when regulations change, or the geopolitical situation shifts, and suddenly the infrastructure you build your business on isn’t available on the terms that you need? And this is where the whole concept of sovereignty, or what I, like, call ‘Digital Swaraj’ comes into play,” Patel said in the keynote address.
“And this is precisely why we have been focused on building layers of sovereignty, building layers of privacy across infrastructure environments. It becomes really important to make sovereignty operational, giving enterprises control over their operating environment, data, technology, and AI execution. And this is one of the reasons why we built Sovereign Core…Sovereignty is not the choice between control and innovation. It is what gives enterprises the confidence to innovate and scale while remaining in control,” he added.
