Athira Sethu
Kochi, 7 March 2025
The IndiaAI Compute Portal has now made 14,000 GPUs (graphics processing units) available to startups, researchers, app developers, and others. Union Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said another 4,000 GPUs will be made available shortly. The government is also considering 67 proposals for an Indian foundational model, of which 22 are large language models.
Vaishnaw said additional GPUs will be added each quarter, with a significant amount of the shared computing power going towards building India’s own base model. He said the government will choose the most advanced applications to further develop, potentially three to five of them, to start working on this ambitious endeavor.
Apart from this, Vaishnaw introduced AI Kosha, the IndiaAI Datasets Platform, through which non-personal data of government departments like agriculture, weather, logistics, and language translation will be available for training AI models. The government also intends to get private firms on board to provide non-personal data to the platform in order to enhance the datasets further.
The government has launched the AI Competency Framework to enable civil servants to develop skills in AI. The iGOT AI platform will suggest AI courses based on the roles of civil servants. Vaishnaw also announced that 27 AI data labs will be established in smaller cities and towns. Over one million civil servants have enrolled for AI courses, and almost 950,000 have completed them.
The GPU facility will be ready at Rs 67 per GPU hour. Vaishnaw pointed out that India is creating its AI infrastructure at a third of the expenses of developed nations. He added that in three to four years, India would create its own GPU chips and, within five years, rank among the world’s top five tech nations in AI, semiconductors, and deep tech. Vaishnaw also countered the U.S. cap on GPU exports by saying that it would not affect India’s plans.
