India to have its own GPUs in next 3-4 years, says Ashwini Vaishnaw

India will have its own globally competitive graphics processing units (GPUs) in three to four years, said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union minister for electronics and information technology, on Thursday.

 

“We are talking to experts on developing our chipsets,” said Vaishnaw.

 

He was speaking at a media briefing marking a year of the “India AI (artificial intelligence) Mission”.

 

As part of the event, the government unveiled the GPU portal and AI Kosha, a non-personal dataset platform.

 

“We have a formal compute facility of 15,000 GPUs, which is more than what we have targeted. There are another 4,000 in the pipeline, and many more will come in the forthcoming quarter.”

 

He added the cost of using these GPUs was historically low — at less than ₹100 an hour after getting a 40 per cent profit margin.

 

The India AI Mission was launched with an initial target of 10,000 GPUs. It was approved in March last year with an outlay of ₹10,738 crore.

 

The IndiaAI Compute Portal will give access to computing for more than 18,000 GPUs and other AI cloud services to startups, application developers, researchers, and students. It will allow end users to access a wide range of high-end GPUs and facilitate AI research and innovation in the country.

 

Calling access to quality datasets the second pillar of the mission, he said: “We have non-personal data from multiple ministries already available on AI Kosha. Many of these datasets from the agriculture department, weather forecasting, and logistics are available for training learners.”

 

The government launched a competency framework for AI and public-sector officials. Under it, it will train government officials.

 

Referring to adopting AI courses as a milestone, Vaishnaw said: “We have thousands of courses and some of those are popular. More than one million civil servants have registered for them and about 950,000 have completed the courses.”

 

For homegrown AI startups, the government initiated the IndiaAI Startups Global Acceleration Programme to mentor them and give them opportunities in the European market. The programme, of four months, has been launched in collaboration with Station F and HEC Paris.

 

Vaishnaw said the country was creating foundational courses in data and AI for higher and senior secondary students, focusing on Tier-II and -III cities.

 

India will develop its indigenous foundational AI model using this infrastructure.

 

He said of the 67 applications the government had received, 22 were for large language models.