Bharat1.AI is working on a 70-acre artificial intelligence city near Bengaluru's Agara Lake, designed as a large-scale environment where researchers, robots, AI agents and digital twins can interact to generate real-world data for developing and testing physical AI systems.
The project forms the second phase of Bharat1.AI's infrastructure plans. Its first phase, the B1 AI Superpark at RGA Tech Park on Sarjapur Road, is already taking shape. The 500,000-square-foot, 10-storey facility has capacity for around 8,000 to 10,000 people, with its second floor operational and teams working on robotic AI models and other technologies.
The proposed AI city is expected to accommodate around 6,000 researchers as residents and have approximately 25,000 people working within the ecosystem. Bharat1.AI expects the township to open by 2029.
The company plans to equip the city with around 2,500 cameras, 800 radars and more than 6,000 robots. Together, these systems are expected to capture interactions between people, machines and their surroundings. Bharat1.AI estimates the infrastructure could generate one exabyte, or one billion gigabytes, of data annually for AI research and model training.
A central part of the project is the use of digital twins. People living within the proposed township would have digital counterparts that could be used to test agentic AI scenarios. These AI agents could interact with one another to perform tasks such as booking tickets, allowing researchers to study autonomous systems in simulated and physical environments.
Bharat1.AI co-founder and CEO Umakant Soni said the company wants to build a city-scale simulator for AI training, inference and the development of physical AI use cases. The project is partly inspired by Shanghai's Foundation Model Innovation Center, but Bharat1.AI is seeking to combine conventional AI research with human interaction and physical AI.
The planned township would also require supporting infrastructure such as mobility, healthcare, schools and safe agentic browsers. The company said it is in discussions around developing these components.
Data governance will be another part of the project. Bharat1.AI has said its focus includes AI safety and generating data for advanced frontier models, with safeguards and consent mechanisms planned for researchers living in the city.
Bharat1.AI was co-founded by Soni, Subhashis Banerjee and Sireesh Kupendra, with former Department of Science and Technology Secretary Ashutosh Sharma and Emmanuel Bacry joining as founding advisors.
The company is reportedly looking to raise about $650 million to finance its broader plans, as it moves from the Bengaluru Superpark towards a city-scale testing environment for agentic and physical AI.
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