Ready to fund up to 50% of AI compute infra: Meity secy S Krishnan

The government is ready to finance up to 50 per cent to create Artificial Intelligence (AI) compute infrastructure in the country, said S Krishnan, secretary Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY)

“The target is to establish at least 10,000 GPU (graphics processing unit) worth of AI compute capacity in the country, and for this the government is prepared to provide for a significant increase of up to about 50 per cent of the cost of creating this infrastructure,” Krishnan said as the CII Annual Business Summit 2024.

Under the Rs 10,372 crore India AI Mission, a key focus area is to develop high-end compute capacity within the country, for which the government will facilitate the setting up of more than 10,000 GPUs under the public-private partnership (PPP) model. 

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“In order to speed up the entire process, the idea is to partner with a variety of private institutions so that we are able to work with the private sector in making this capacity available quickly,” he added.

Secretary Krishnan also said that MeitY will work in association with the private sector and ensure that the compute capacity itself is privately created but the utilisation could be at a subsidised rate for certain identified use cases.

Further, for faster and wider availability of GPU resources in the country, the government might look at the viability gap funding approach or a voucher based mechanism for the sector, Krishnan said.

“For a wider use of GPU capacity by different types of providers, we want to make it available both on possibly viability cap fund (VGF) basis where new capacity would be created and there would be a VGF from the government or alternatively, a voucher-based mechanism where the capacity is already created and we issue out vouchers which people can use,” he added.

Krishnan further said that in addition to the compute infrastructure being created under the India AI mission, there is a separate capacity developed for the government’s own use under the National Supercomputing Mission.