India and Japan sign an AI pact to share compute, models and talent

Most AI diplomacy so far has been the US and China circling each other, so two large democracies pooling chips and talent is a quiet third path worth watching. The trade is elegant: Japan has hardware and a labor gap, India has engineers and needs compute, and together they can build without waiting on either superpower. If more middle powers pair up like this, the map of who matters in AI stops being a two-country story.