Data centre firm Yotta's Nvidia AI chip orders to reach $1 billion: CEO

Indian data centre operator Yotta's plans to purchase more AI chips from its partner Nvidia will be worth $500 million, taking its total order book with the U.S. firm to $1 billion as Yotta beefs up AI cloud services, its chief executive told Reuters.

Yotta said last month that it would place an order for Nvidia chips but did not give a value for the deal or say which chips it would buy.

Sunil Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Yotta, told Reuters on Thursday that the order would comprise nearly 16,000 of Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips H100 and GH200 and will be placed by March 2025.

It comes on top of an order Yotta placed last year with Nvidia for about 16,000 H100 chips, due for delivery by July this year, Gupta said.

AI deals in India are crucial for Nvidia, which is facing roadblocks in certain chip exports to China and some other countries due to U.S. restrictions.

Last September the U.S. chipmaker struck AI partnerships with Indian conglomerates Reliance Industries and Tata Group to develop cloud infrastructure and language models, as well as generative AI applications.

Yotta, part of Indian billionaire Niranjan Hiranandani's real estate group, is a partner firm for Nvidia in India and runs three data centre campuses, in Mumbai, Gujarat and near New Delhi.

Growing storage and processing demand has prompted the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon to ramp up cloud and data centre investments in India in recent years. Indian billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani too have joined the race.

Nvidia globally has a near-monopoly on the computing systems used to power services like ChatGPT, OpenAI's blockbuster generative AI chatbot. Yotta estimates AI adoption in India to reach $14 billion by 2030.

"India's AI ambition is just not possible unless this infra comes to India," Gupta said, speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit. The event, held in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state, is one of his last major efforts to draw investments before he stands for re-election later this year.

Shankar Trivedi, a top Nvidia executive, said at the Gujarat event on Wednesday that Yotta is setting up an AI data centre in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City, a new tech city, which will go live by March.