Global tech firms likely to lead India’s local AI compute charge

For these firms, creating artificial intelligence (AI) computing infrastructure will entail strategic investments in India’s developing technology ecosystem, industry experts and stakeholders said.

The ₹10,372 crore ($1.3 billion) outlay of the AI Mission will have the Centre back an AI-compute-as-a-service programme, build subject-specific large language models (LLMs) through AI Innovation Centres, and create a Unified Data Platform to open-source Indian language datasets for AI applications. To build compute, the Centre will seek public-private partnerships—wherein private firms that offer proposals under the Mission would be approved by the Centre to build the AI compute in question.

Speaking on the matter in an interview with Mint, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union minister of state for IT, said, “AI compute infrastructure and data centres will be offered as a service, and built by private technology companies. Funding by the India AI Mission will be based on proposals received and evaluated.”

Chandrasekhar confirmed that once built, the AI infrastructure programme will be merged with the second phase of the National Supercomputing Mission. “Public-sector capacity will be created by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), and its technology and startup ecosystem. The latter will offer AI-compute-as-a-service, based on designed-in-India Rudra servers. The Mission is a separate business division within ‘Digital India’, and will be responsible for catalyzing and overseeing expansion of India’s AI ecosystem,” he added.

The final breakdown of the fund’s outlay is yet to be published, and is expected in the coming months. However, experts note that India’s AI fund is nearly at par with global precedents.

“In January, the United States introduced a policy called National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), which offered support of $2.6 billion in six years to build a similar set of tools and solutions as India’s AI Mission. While not all of India’s $1.3-billion AI fund will go into building compute, comparatively this is a comparably sizeable start for our nation’s tech ambitions,” said Kashyap Kompella, founder and chief executive of industry consultancy firm RPA2AI Research.

Kompella added that the UK, too, has a similar fund—but only covers doctoral AI research and is of a smaller corpus. In October last year, the UK government announced a £118-million ( ₹1,250 crore) plan to accelerate funding for AI-based research programmes.

Jayanth Kolla, co-founder and partner at industry consultant Convergence Catalyst, concurred that the funding corpus is sizeable. “The biggest takeaway for India from this is that it formalizes the government’s prioritization of AI. The PPP model will also bring in big tech involvement in creating such compute infrastructure—which will rope in the likes of Google, Microsoft, Nvidia. This will be a positive step forward to democratize access to AI compute infrastructure, which the academia simply does not have the resources for,” he added.

Since computing chips are the most expensive part of training AI models and building applications, Big Tech can help fulfill the gap in availability of funding in research and academia.

Queries sent to Google, Microsoft and Nvidia, the three companies leading in AI infrastructure globally, did not receive any responses till press time.

Both Kolla and Kompella believe that for the big tech firms, the key benefit will be access to India’s datasets, as well as a wide user and client base for the infrastructure providers, in exchange of their cloud and compute infrastructure—which could lead to multiple leading tech firms being interested in the project. Two senior policy consultants who work closely with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) said that prior to the formalization of a report by seven working committee groups on the India AI Mission back in October last year, the IT ministry had held “soft consultations” with “multiple leading American tech firms” on how such a model may work.

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Published: 08 Mar 2024, 08:39 PM IST