Countries should have sovereign capability on AI, says IBM Chairman

The Indian government should take lead and set up a "compute infrastructure" for the development of artificial intelligence in the manner it did for super computing and communications, IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said on Monday.

Krishna said every country should build sovereign capability in artificial intelligence and the government should provide a base for technologies that are nascent and have high risk appetite.

"I am a firm believer that every country ought to have some sovereign capability on artificial intelligence because you want to use it for purposes which the rest of the world may not want to invest in. That means you need capability on compute and storage and data sets and I think it is for the nation to provide," Krishna told reporters.

He said that only two large economies of the world have compute infrastructure for AI and some countries have started plans for setting it up.

"India is largely a services economy in tech. But they have to do the investment. I think you can become proficient at hundreds of millions of US dollars. Hundreds of millions of US dollars is well within the capacity of India," Krishna said.

Building AI technology or AI engines call for investment in high-speed computer chips like graphical processing units or application-specific chips.

Recently, Chinese companies ordered USD 5 billion worth of chipsets from Nvidia to build generative artificial intelligence systems.

Companies in the US are also investing heavily in high-end chipsets to build AI capability.

Microsoft provided OpenAI LP with a USD 1-billion investment in 2019 and a USD 10-billion investment in 2023.

IBM alone invested USD 6.5 billion in research, development and engineering to innovate in the field of AI, hybrid cloud and emerging areas such as quantum in 2022.

In July 2023 quarter, Nvidia reported over 100 per cent jump in revenue at USD 13.5 billion and over nine-fold jump in its net income mainly on demand for chipsets for AI.

"Investment from the government should be to set up, lets say, national AI computing centres. They should set up an infrastructure which could be under one of the existing bodies or maybe this new body. The same India did for computing, which has helped in lots of things," Krishna said.

The IBM chief said he has had a discussion with the minister of state Rajeev Chandrasekhar and sees there is receptiveness to the idea of setting up such infrastructure.

"I think in order to take advantage of the opportunity, and India becomes a source of deployment on these things as well as use it internally for government and citizen services then India has to have some infrastructure," Krishna said.