Start-up plans world's first human-centric AI city in Bengaluru
17 Feb 2026

At the ongoing AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, Bharat1.AI, a Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, has announced its ambitious plan to build the world's first "humanity-first" AI city.

The project would be a city-scale research and infrastructure initiative aimed at testing AI agents and physical AI in real-world scenarios.

The proposed location for this innovative venture is Sarjapura, Bengaluru.

What is the AI city project?
Project details

Bharat1.AI's project isn't about letting AI models run the entire city. Instead, it's about creating a city-scale research and infrastructure initiative to stress-test AI agents and physical AI in real-world scenarios.

The start-up said that while large language models have shown impressive capabilities in language and coding, intelligence built mainly on fragmented internet-scale data is not enough for the next generation of autonomous systems.

Plans to build a 500,000 sq ft AI campus
Solution approach

Bharat1.AI believes the answer to these problems lies in validated, real-world intelligence grounded in real-world data.

As part of its moonshot project, the start-up plans to build a 500,000 sq ft AI research and innovation campus in Sarjapura.

The facility will offer model training, fine-tuning and inference capabilities as well as plug-and-play labs with access to AI cloud services among other things.

Training and testing next-generation AI systems
Development goals

During this period, Bharat1.AI plans to develop and stress-test universal basic intelligence frameworks in controlled, real-world conditions.

The start-up also intends to build open city-scale world models using structured, high-quality multimodal data.

This is all part of their plan to create robust validation layers for agentic and physical AI systems before they are deployed at scale.

Responsible AI evolution
Leadership insight

Umakant Soni, co-founder and CEO of Bharat1.AI, said at the AI Impact Summit, "We are at an inflection point in the AI revolution. Intelligence is moving out of labs and into the fabric of society."

He added that "scaling systems without validating them in complex, real-world environments is a risk we cannot afford," highlighting their commitment to responsible AI evolution through projects like B1 AI Superpark.