The 2026 Summit advanced the BRICS GRAIN network and sovereign subsea-cable plans, pooling high-performance computing, quantum research, and mega-science infrastructure to reduce Global South dependence on proprietary Western technology stacks.
The 18th BRICS Summit, held September 12-13 at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi under India’s fourth chairship of the grouping, closed with the unanimous adoption of the 140-point New Delhi Declaration — a document that, for the first time, treats computing infrastructure, quantum research, and telecommunications sovereignty as central planks of the bloc’s cooperation agenda rather than peripheral technical footnotes.
The declaration’s technology architecture rests on groundwork laid earlier in the year. At the 14th BRICS Science, Technology and Innovation Ministerial Meeting in Chennai on August 21, chaired by India’s Union Minister of State for Science and Technology, Dr Jitendra Singh, following a preparatory Senior Officials’ Meeting at IIT Madras, member states unanimously adopted the Chennai Consensus. That document set the operational rules the New Delhi Declaration later endorsed, and it did so around a single organizing idea: BRICS members with capital-intensive research infrastructure should open it to members that lack it.
The clearest expression of that idea is the BRICS Global Research Advanced Infrastructure Network, or BRICS GRAIN. The New Delhi Declaration welcomes the Action Plan produced by the BRICS Working Group on Research Infrastructure and Megascience Projects, which met on July 8-9, and endorses a proposal to create GRAIN’s Joint Coordination Committee and a set of thematic GRAIN Centres. It is worth being precise about what GRAIN is at this stage and what it is not: it is not yet a functioning access system with allocated beam-time slots. It is a governance framework member states have now agreed to build, with a digital web platform already live for national research-infrastructure databases to be updated. Once operational, the ambition is that scientists in smaller or capital-constrained BRICS economies would be able to apply for access to synchrotron light sources, high-flux neutron beam facilities, and nanofabrication cleanrooms hosted in Brazil, Russia, India, and China, without the multi-billion-dollar capital outlay such facilities normally require.
Alongside GRAIN, the declaration takes note of the draft BRICS Science and Research Repository, envisaged as a voluntary platform for mapping institutions, researchers, datasets, and infrastructure across the bloc — explicitly bounded, its framers stress, by each member’s own data-security and intellectual-property laws, so it functions as a catalogue rather than an open data commons.
Quantum science drew its own dedicated commitment. The New Delhi Declaration reaffirms the Joint Statement of the BRICS Countries on Quantum Technologies, adopted in June, under which member states pledged joint research on post-quantum cryptographic standards, quantum-safe communications, and quantum sensing techniques — the latter with clear application to subterranean mineral discovery, a priority for resource-rich members such as Brazil and South Africa. The declaration also floats a recurring BRICS Quantum Technologies Forum, hosted by whichever country holds the chairship in a given year.
On artificial intelligence, the declaration’s framing merits a small but important correction to how the AI item is sometimes summarized: the operative commitment is not a newly minted discussion paper, but a pledge to implement the BRICS Leaders’ Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence, the bloc’s standalone AI position first adopted at the 2025 Rio Summit. The New Delhi Declaration folds that earlier statement into its 2026 technology agenda, calling for wider, more equitable access to AI resources — compute, datasets, and foundational models — while flagging coordinated action against cybercrime, misinformation, hate speech, and deepfakes generated or amplified by AI systems. The emphasis throughout is on AI as an instrument of economic growth and sustainable development for the Global South, rather than as a narrowly framed safety or containment problem.
Telecommunications sovereignty is the fourth pillar. The declaration references development of a dedicated communications network through submarine cables between BRICS countries, a project still at the discussion and feasibility stage rather than one with a construction timeline. The underlying logic, echoed across summit commentary, is to reduce reliance on maritime data corridors and cable-landing infrastructure controlled by non-BRICS telecom consortia — corridors member states argue have proven vulnerable to both physical disruption and third-party surveillance. Complementing that physical-layer ambition, the declaration also welcomes a BRICS Digital Public Infrastructure Repository, intended to let members share open-source identity, data-exchange, and payment-rail architectures modeled loosely on India’s own Aadhaar-UPI stack, reducing developing economies’ dependence on proprietary Western software platforms.
Taken together, the four commitments describe a direction of travel rather than a finished system. GRAIN centres, the Quantum Forum, the submarine cable network, and the DPI Repository are, as of this month, agreed frameworks and working-group mandates — not live infrastructure. Their significance for readers following India’s science and technology posture lies less in what has already been built than in the institutional plumbing member states have now committed to constructing, and in the fact that India — through IIT Madras’s role in the STI process and its own National Quantum Mission and National Supercomputing Mission — has positioned itself as a principal architect of that plumbing rather than merely a participant in it. Whether GRAIN’s beam-time-sharing model survives the harder negotiations over cost-sharing and national data-security carve-outs that member states have already flagged as unresolved will be the real test of whether 2026’s declarations translate into 2027’s working laboratories.
– Amarendra Dasari
