The 18th BRICS summit has concluded on 12 and 13 September 2026 in New Delhi, under India’s chairmanship and the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”. What distinguishes this chairmanship from its predecessors is the place given to information technology. Artificial intelligence governance has been placed at the centre of the 2026 agenda. The flagship initiative is the promotion of Digital Public Infrastructure as a scalable development model for the Global South, built on India’s own experience with Aadhaar-linked UPI. And the most concrete deliverable expected in September is digital as well: the operational deployment of BRICS Pay, the cross-border payment system meant to interconnect the members’ national networks.
In a year marked by war in the Middle East, an energy crisis and American tariff pressure on various countries reaching 50 percent on some products, technology is one of the few areas where the enlarged group can still cooperate without immediately colliding with its internal political divergences. The Indian sherpa’s own framing points in this direction: consolidating the expanded format through cooperation in less contentious but strategic areas such as AI governance and digital trade.
The digital toolbox: three layers of instruments
The information technology agenda of BRICS is best read as three layers of instruments, each with a different degree of maturity.
The first layer is financial-digital infrastructure. BRICS Pay aims to interconnect India’s UPI, China’s CIPS, Russia’s SPFS and Brazil’s Pix, allowing direct transactions in local currencies without routing through SWIFT or using the dollar as an intermediary. The Reserve Bank of India leads the technical coordination, has placed central bank digital currency interoperability on the agenda, and full operational deployment is targeted for the New Delhi summit. Behind it stands the New Development Bank, which as of April 2026 has approved 42.9 billion dollars across 139 projects and targets 30 percent local-currency lending.
The second layer is normative: the governance of artificial intelligence and of data. At the Rio summit in July 2025, BRICS leaders adopted a declaration on the global governance of AI, calling on the United Nations to lead the formulation of global rules and warning that the technology must not deepen inequalities between developed and developing countries. India has carried this line forward in 2026, hosting a major AI summit and pushing a model of AI governance that observers describe as development-oriented, in deliberate contrast with Western frameworks centred on risk mitigation. Russia’s foreign minister has publicly welcomed the initiative while insisting that BRICS nations will resist any curbs on their sovereignty, a reminder that the normative layer is also a sovereignty battlefield.
The third layer is physical and institutional infrastructure. India promotes Digital Public Infrastructure as an open-architecture model that Global South countries can adapt rather than a ready-made system to import. The group has an intergovernmental agreement to share data from a BRICS remote sensing satellite constellation, reducing reliance on Western space agencies for earth observation. But the physical base remains fragile: India alone consumes around 20 percent of world internet traffic while hosting only about 2 percent of submarine cable infrastructure. The gap between digital ambition and material substrate is one of the least discussed constraints on the whole agenda.
A performance perspective: declaration versus deployment
How do we measure the performance of this digital toolbox: the distance between declaration and deployment. BRICS has never lacked declarations; what it has historically lacked is operational follow-through.
Measured this way, the record is mixed. On the deployment side, the NDB’s 42.9 billion dollars across 139 projects is real money, and the satellite data-sharing agreement is a functioning arrangement. On the declaration side, the AI governance framework remains at the level of principles, and BRICS Pay has been announced repeatedly since 2018 without yet processing transactions at scale. September 2026 is precisely the moment when this second category is supposed to cross into the first.
Three structural constraints weigh on the outcome. First, the infrastructure gap just mentioned: payment rails and AI models run on cables, data centres and chips that the group does not collectively control. Second, heterogeneity: the enlarged format brings together members with incompatible data governance regimes, from China’s tightly controlled model to more open approaches, and with divergent exposure to American secondary sanctions. Third, external pressure: Washington’s tariff threats against countries aligning with “anti-American” policies are designed to raise the cost of exactly the kind of financial-digital integration that BRICS Pay embodies. India, which negotiates with the United States while chairing BRICS, feels this constraint more than anyone.
The African angle: Informational Hedging
For the African members (South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia) and partner states, the BRICS digital offer has a specific meaning, captured here through the concept of informational hedging[1]: the deliberate distribution of digital dependence (networks, payment rails, data infrastructure, governance standards) across several great-power partners, so that no single one holds a decisive lever.
Seen from Africa, the value of the BRICS toolbox is not that it replaces Western or Chinese infrastructure, but that it widens the menu. Digital Public Infrastructure on an open-architecture model is attractive precisely because it does not lock the adopter into one vendor’s stack. BRICS Pay, if it works, adds a settlement option alongside SWIFT rather than a substitute for it. AI governance framed around development outcomes speaks to states whose priority is agriculture, health and education applications rather than frontier model safety. In each case, the instrument’s usefulness to African states depends on it remaining optional, adaptable and non-exclusive. A BRICS digital order that demanded alignment would defeat the very logic that makes it attractive.
After New Delhi, 2026
A deployment test: does BRICS Pay go live, with verifiable transactions between at least two national payment systems, or does it remain an announced pilot for the eighth consecutive year? A normative test: does the summit move AI governance from declared principles to any binding or at least reviewable mechanism, for instance a common framework with reporting, or does it stop at another statement of intent? An infrastructure test: do the DPI and connectivity commitments come with financing, notably through the NDB, or do they remain a showcase of the Indian model without a transfer mechanism?
The answers will tell us whether information technology is becoming the load-bearing structure of BRICS cooperation, or whether it is simply the least conflictual language available to a group that can no longer agree on much else. For the states of the Global South, and African states in particular, even the second outcome has value: a loose digital toolbox, offered without exclusivity, is exactly what a hedging strategy needs.
Main sources (verified online, July 2026)
- Official website of the Indian BRICS 2026 chairmanship: https://www.brics2026.gov.in/
- TV BRICS, 1 January 2026, “India officially becomes BRICS Chair”: https://tvbrics.com/en/news/india-officially-becomes-brics-chair/ (DPI flagship, AI governance and digital trade as consolidation areas)
- Wikipedia (en), “17th BRICS summit”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17th_BRICS_summit (Rio 2025 AI governance declaration, UN-led rules)
- DD News, “Lavrov outlines BRICS’ global role, priorities under India’s 2026 chairmanship”: https://ddnews.gov.in/en/lavrov-outlines-brics-global-role-priorities-under-indias-2026-chairmanship/ (ICT safeguards, AI summit, sovereignty)
- The Geostrata, “India’s 2026 BRICS Presidency: Reshaping BRICS for a Fragmented World”: https://www.thegeostrata.com/post/india-s-2026-brics-presidency (DPI, Aadhaar-linked UPI, AI governance)
- Diplomatist, 30 April 2026, “India’s BRICS Presidency 2026: Navigating India’s Opportunity to Shape BRICS AI Governance Framework”: https://diplomatist.com/indias-brics-presidency-2026-navigating-indias-opportunity-to-shape-brics-ai-governance-framework/ (development-oriented AI governance, AI Impact Summit 2026)
- Drishti IAS, “BRICS STI Cooperation”: https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/brics-sti-cooperation (remote sensing satellite constellation data-sharing agreement)
- Rio Times, “BRICS Countries 2026”: https://www.riotimesonline.com/brics-2026-complete-guide/ (BRICS Pay architecture and summit deployment target, CBDC interoperability, NDB figures; secondary source, to be cross-checked before academic citation)
- ReSPUBLICA, “L’Inde, présidente des BRICS+ en 2026”: https://www.gaucherepublicaine.org/respublica-monde/linde-presidente-des-brics-en-2026/7440463 (20 percent of world internet traffic against 2 percent of submarine cable infrastructure)
BRICS 2026: Technology, Performance and Power
The 18th BRICS summit has concluded on 12 and 13 September 2026 in New Delhi, under India’s chairmanship and the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”. What distinguishes this chairmanship from its predecessors is the place given to information technology. Artificial intelligence governance has been placed at the centre of the 2026 agenda. The flagship initiative is the promotion of Digital Public Infrastructure as a scalable development model for the Global South, built on India’s own experience with Aadhaar-linked UPI. And the most concrete deliverable expected in September is digital as well: the operational deployment of BRICS Pay, the cross-border payment system meant to interconnect the members’ national networks.
In a year marked by war in the Middle East, an energy crisis and American tariff pressure on various countries reaching 50 percent on some products, technology is one of the few areas where the enlarged group can still cooperate without immediately colliding with its internal political divergences. The Indian sherpa’s own framing points in this direction: consolidating the expanded format through cooperation in less contentious but strategic areas such as AI governance and digital trade.
The digital toolbox: three layers of instruments
The information technology agenda of BRICS is best read as three layers of instruments, each with a different degree of maturity.
The first layer is financial-digital infrastructure. BRICS Pay aims to interconnect India’s UPI, China’s CIPS, Russia’s SPFS and Brazil’s Pix, allowing direct transactions in local currencies without routing through SWIFT or using the dollar as an intermediary. The Reserve Bank of India leads the technical coordination, has placed central bank digital currency interoperability on the agenda, and full operational deployment is targeted for the New Delhi summit. Behind it stands the New Development Bank, which as of April 2026 has approved 42.9 billion dollars across 139 projects and targets 30 percent local-currency lending.
The second layer is normative: the governance of artificial intelligence and of data. At the Rio summit in July 2025, BRICS leaders adopted a declaration on the global governance of AI, calling on the United Nations to lead the formulation of global rules and warning that the technology must not deepen inequalities between developed and developing countries. India has carried this line forward in 2026, hosting a major AI summit and pushing a model of AI governance that observers describe as development-oriented, in deliberate contrast with Western frameworks centred on risk mitigation. Russia’s foreign minister has publicly welcomed the initiative while insisting that BRICS nations will resist any curbs on their sovereignty, a reminder that the normative layer is also a sovereignty battlefield.
The third layer is physical and institutional infrastructure. India promotes Digital Public Infrastructure as an open-architecture model that Global South countries can adapt rather than a ready-made system to import. The group has an intergovernmental agreement to share data from a BRICS remote sensing satellite constellation, reducing reliance on Western space agencies for earth observation. But the physical base remains fragile: India alone consumes around 20 percent of world internet traffic while hosting only about 2 percent of submarine cable infrastructure. The gap between digital ambition and material substrate is one of the least discussed constraints on the whole agenda.
A performance perspective: declaration versus deployment
How do we measure the performance of this digital toolbox: the distance between declaration and deployment. BRICS has never lacked declarations; what it has historically lacked is operational follow-through.
Measured this way, the record is mixed. On the deployment side, the NDB’s 42.9 billion dollars across 139 projects is real money, and the satellite data-sharing agreement is a functioning arrangement. On the declaration side, the AI governance framework remains at the level of principles, and BRICS Pay has been announced repeatedly since 2018 without yet processing transactions at scale. September 2026 is precisely the moment when this second category is supposed to cross into the first.
Three structural constraints weigh on the outcome. First, the infrastructure gap just mentioned: payment rails and AI models run on cables, data centres and chips that the group does not collectively control. Second, heterogeneity: the enlarged format brings together members with incompatible data governance regimes, from China’s tightly controlled model to more open approaches, and with divergent exposure to American secondary sanctions. Third, external pressure: Washington’s tariff threats against countries aligning with “anti-American” policies are designed to raise the cost of exactly the kind of financial-digital integration that BRICS Pay embodies. India, which negotiates with the United States while chairing BRICS, feels this constraint more than anyone.
The African angle: Informational Hedging
For the African members (South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia) and partner states, the BRICS digital offer has a specific meaning, captured here through the concept of informational hedging[1]: the deliberate distribution of digital dependence (networks, payment rails, data infrastructure, governance standards) across several great-power partners, so that no single one holds a decisive lever.
Seen from Africa, the value of the BRICS toolbox is not that it replaces Western or Chinese infrastructure, but that it widens the menu. Digital Public Infrastructure on an open-architecture model is attractive precisely because it does not lock the adopter into one vendor’s stack. BRICS Pay, if it works, adds a settlement option alongside SWIFT rather than a substitute for it. AI governance framed around development outcomes speaks to states whose priority is agriculture, health and education applications rather than frontier model safety. In each case, the instrument’s usefulness to African states depends on it remaining optional, adaptable and non-exclusive. A BRICS digital order that demanded alignment would defeat the very logic that makes it attractive.
After New Delhi, 2026
A deployment test: does BRICS Pay go live, with verifiable transactions between at least two national payment systems, or does it remain an announced pilot for the eighth consecutive year? A normative test: does the summit move AI governance from declared principles to any binding or at least reviewable mechanism, for instance a common framework with reporting, or does it stop at another statement of intent? An infrastructure test: do the DPI and connectivity commitments come with financing, notably through the NDB, or do they remain a showcase of the Indian model without a transfer mechanism?
The answers will tell us whether information technology is becoming the load-bearing structure of BRICS cooperation, or whether it is simply the least conflictual language available to a group that can no longer agree on much else. For the states of the Global South, and African states in particular, even the second outcome has value: a loose digital toolbox, offered without exclusivity, is exactly what a hedging strategy needs.
Main sources (verified online, July 2026)
Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Keep in touch with our news & offers
Franck Techa Djoumessi
What to read next...
Europe’s Angry Streets: The Crisis Behind the Protests
V4+India: The new way to Europe
Anthropic Warns off AI Mad Race: But Why?
Beyond the Dollar: Why BRICS Needs Trust Before it Can Offer Asia an Alternative
Culture Beyond Economics:BRICS Cooperation through Traditional Knowledge and Holistic Development
Role of BRICS in the Global Governance of AI
BRICS as a guiding force in the global power landscape
Beyond the Record: Embodied Connectivity and BRICS Peace