In big AI push, Cabinet clears Rs 10k cr plan to set up computing capacity

Last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the Mission and said its aim was to establish the computing powers of AI within the country. This, he had said, will provide better services to startups and entrepreneurs and also promote AI applications in the sectors of agriculture, healthcare and education.

Under the India AI Mission, the government will look to establish a computing capacity of more than 10,000 GPUs and also help develop foundational models with a capacity of more than 100 billion parameters trained on datasets covering major Indian languages for priority sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and governance. AI Curation Units (ACUs) will also be developed in 50-line ministries. The proposal also includes the establishment of an AI marketplace designed to offer AI as a service and pre-trained models to those working on AI applications.

The implementation of this AI compute infrastructure will be done through a public-private partnership model with 50 per cent viability gap funding. If the compute prices come down, the private entity will have to add more compute capacity within the same budgeted amount to meet increased demand. Of the total outlay, Rs 4,564 crore has been earmarked for building computing infrastructure.

“Basically, there will be a tender inviting companies to set up data centres. When a company applies for, let’s say a centre which may cost Rs 10,000 crore, they can seek a viability gap funding from the government for a certain amount of that,” a senior government official said.

During the infrastructure’s setup, a priority will be placed on selecting the most advanced GPUs. However, it is worth noting that Nvidia’s A100 chip – considered to be the most cutting edge for AI applications – costs around $10,000, meaning that a data centre of 10,000 such GPUs could cost at least $100 million (roughly Rs 8,000 crore).

Computing capacity, or compute, is among the most important elements of building a large AI system apart from algorithmic innovation and datasets. It is also one of the most difficult elements to procure for smaller businesses looking to train and build such AI systems.

The government will also finance deeptech start-ups at various levels of growth, as per the Cabinet approval. Of the total outlay, roughly Rs 2,000 crore has been earmarked towards this.

The government will also set up the IndiaAI Innovation Research Centre which will undertake the development and deployment of large foundational models, with a focus on indigenous large multimodel Models and domain-specific foundational models. Close to Rs 2,000 crore has been earmarked for this centre.

An IndiaAI Datasets Platform will also be set up as part of the programme which will look at leveraging the quality, access, and use of non-personal datasets for AI innovation. The platform will be tasked with hosting identified “high-quality” AI ready datasets.