India’s ambitious plan to enable access to 10,000 graphic processing units (GPUs) that are deemed essential for the creation of artificial intelligence-based applications and models is a “good starting point” as it strives to stay apace with global leaders in the rapidly evolving area of AI innovation, top investors and technologists said.The Rs 10,372-crore Artificial Intelligence (AI) Mission, announced on Thursday, will operate on a public-private partnership model. It will extend GPUs as a digital public infrastructure that can offer AI-as-a-service. Elevate Your Tech Prowess with High-Value Skill CoursesOffering CollegeCourseWebsiteIndian School of BusinessISB Product ManagementVisitMITMIT Technology Leadership and InnovationVisitIIT DelhiIITD Certificate Programme in Data Science & Machine LearningVisitThis will provide Indian companies with their own computing hardware — a scarce resource globally — allowing them to create more AI applications and arming the country to compete better with the likes of the US, China and the UK which are ahead in the race to dominate the sunrise sector.“The government’s AI mission is incredibly exciting for India and its vibrant startup ecosystem. Investing in 10,000 GPUs and making them available to researchers and innovators will make a huge difference as we aim to build (India) the AI application capital of the world,” Rajan Anandan, managing director, Peak XV Partners, told ET adding that it will provide critical building blocks that AI startups can leverage to “build in India, for India and for the world”.In addition to IndiaAI Innovation Centre for the development and deployment of indigenous Large Multimodal Models and domain-specific foundational models in critical sectors, the mission will also provide access to targeted funding for AI startups.India now has over 100 generative AI startups, however, the investment into the space has been comparatively small. The US saw nearly $250 billion private investments into AI startups between 2013 and 2022, while investments in India stood at just $8 billion. Discover the stories of your interestBlockchain5 StoriesCyber-safety7 StoriesFintech9 StoriesE-comm9 StoriesML8 StoriesEdtech6 StoriesOver the same period, China saw $95 billion of investments while for the UK, the number stood at $18 billion, as per data from the AI Index 2023 Annual Report. Last year, Indian conglomerates such as the Tata Group and Reliance Industries announced partnerships with top GPU maker Nvidia to obtain computing infrastructure to build their own AI applications. However, startups facing resource constraints have been petitioning the government to invest into computing infrastructure to ensure they also get access and do not lose out in the dynamic AI race.The Centre’s latest move will enable these AI startups to create foundational models from scratch for a variety of applications, for which they were earlier dependent on models from the likes of OpenAI and Meta.Vishal Dhupar, managing director for South Asia at Nvidia, said that the government’s latest outlay creates a “highway” for innovation to happen. “I’m so pleased that the digital transformation has taken place in the country. Now you can embed AI into it,” he said while speaking at an event in the national capital on Friday.Dhupar added that this enables solutions to be built for India and that solutions built here at population scale are applicable globally. “I’m hoping India’s advantage is to migrate from general purpose compute to accelerated compute, and you will have sufficient highway for this country to make a difference.”Nvidia stock has seen an unprecedented rally this year, which has pushed its market cap beyond $2.3 trillion, making it the third-largest company globally.It will provide Reliance Industries access to its most advanced Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and Nvidia DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service in the cloud. GH200 provides massive memory bandwidth.The GPUs will be made available in the next 18-24 months, said electronics and IT secretary S Krishnan on the sidelines of an event on Friday.He added that the government will invite bids from the industry under the mission and provide viability gap funding for this compute infrastructure.Playing catchupGlobally, countries like the UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been shelling big money to acquire AI chips to boost their countries’ companies. For instance, the UK is building a national AI resource, as a part of which it would acquire 5,000 Nvidia GPUs. Saudi Arabia, through the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, reportedly bought 3,000 Nvidia GPUs worth $40,000 each. This year, the UAE announced a $500 million investment to Falcon Foundation to develop open-source generative AI models and provide technology access to emerging economies.Pointing out that the “market of GPUs is very dynamic with new technologies coming in and rendering existing technologies outdated,” Tanuj Bhojwani, head, people+ai, an initiative by Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani’s EkStep Foundation, said “ the government should play the role of investor and not (of) a purchaser or a customer.”“Merely going out into the market and purchasing 10,000 GPUs may not do the trick, the government should think like an investor,” he added.People+ai has been working on a digital public infrastructure (DPI) for creating a network of interoperable data centres in the country.Boost for startupsStartups are terming Thursday’s announcement as ‘historic’ and said it could bring in a ‘transformative era’ for India’s AI landscape as it offers “ affordable compute”.“High-quality, well-organised data is the bedrock of all AI developments, and the mission will help harness India’s vast data repository for the larger good of society, especially in fields like healthcare and agriculture,” said Kunal Bahl, co-founder of Snapdeal and Titan Capital.Others such as Gagandeep Reehal, chief executive of Minus Zero, said, “creating shared infrastructure for AI was a much-needed boost in this global AI race, similar to what UPI did for fintech.”Minus Zero is a Bengaluru-based AI startup that builds self-driving car technology. It is building foundational models for autonomous driving.Ankush Sabharwal, chief executive of Corover AI which built a large language model BharatGPT, said the initiative is “poised to revolutionise sectors such as healthcare, education, agriculture, banking, travel and governance” as India aims to cultivate a robust and globally competitive AI ecosystem.
