At the India AI Impact Summit 2026, where several pioneering technologies made their debut, Intel highlighted its “Frugal AI” approach, which is designed with the aim of making artificial intelligence practical, efficient and scalable across India.
The company said the right infrastructure must match the workloads it supports. Its frugal AI approach focuses on distributed computing across PCs, edge devices, and localized systems rather than relying solely on centralized cloud infrastructure.
According to Intel, AI uses heterogeneous architectures combining CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, and other accelerators, designed to improve performance per watt and per buck.
The release said Intel’s silicon-to-system strategy optimizes performance and power efficiency, making it practical and resource-conscious for India to adopt AI while enabling sustainable scaling within cost and infrastructure limits.
AI PC for active manufacturing
Intel, which has been present in India for 37 years and operates its largest engineering center outside the United States in the country, said it is playing a key role in designing the next generation AI-ready client platform.
These devices allow on-device AI processing with improvements of 50 percent or more in CPU and graphics performance, along with significantly higher NPU efficiency, making AI workloads possible without discrete GPUs.
On-device AI also supports privacy-preserving, real-time predictions, reducing dependency on the cloud.
Intel noted that AI PCs can power emerging use cases including agentic AI, deepfake detection, AI-powered content creation, and custom AI assistants. It adds that lower system costs and power requirements make scalable AI adoption more accessible to students, enterprises and developers.
expanding access to education
Intel highlighted the gap between connectivity and digital flows in India. While smartphone penetration is 95 percent, PC penetration is only 9.9 percent, which limits practical learning, coding, design, and AI experimentation. Only about 20 percent of Indians are proficient in computer use.
The company said that moving from digital literacy to digital fluency requires consistent access to PCs in classrooms and homes.
Collaboration between OEMs, ISVs, teachers and edtech partners is critical to make AI-powered education personalised, vernacular and outcome-driven.
Intel further said that expanding affordable PC access is key to democratizing education and building India’s future-ready talent pipeline.
