E2E Networks in talks with IITs to provide GPUs: CTO Mohammed Imran

E2E Networks, which provides graphics processing units (GPUs) to the IndiaAI Mission, is in talks with Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and other higher educational institutions for large-scale artificial intelligence model training, Mohammed Imran, the company’s chief technology officer, said.

 

Such training models require large clusters of GPUs, a specialised processor designed to perform massive parallel calculations necessary for rendering graphics, video, and accelerating complex tasks.

 

“What we have also started discussing with all these larger educational institutes is the ability to do AI-assisted learning or AI Labs for their students. Some of these large institutes are at the forefront of enabling such GPU access for their students,” Imran told Business Standard in a virtual interaction.

 

Several higher education institutions in India are conducting research on large language models, machine learning, and training new models. E2E collaborates with these institutes to provide GPUs to students, allowing them to conduct experiments while learning with the AI-assisted features offered by the company.

 

“[Our] coding assistance gives students help so that they can deploy, create better, or fine-tune scripts. One large GPU box can be multiplexed across different students and then share datasets, set quotas for usage, give them completion certifications,” Imran said.

 

The Delhi-based company in September won a Rs 177-crore contract from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to supply H100 SXM and H200 SXM GPUs to Gnani.ai, a Bengaluru-based startup that is building an indigenous 14 billion parameter voice AI foundation model capable of delivering multilingual, real-time speech processing.

 

E2E Networks has purchased around 3,700 GPUs, which will be deployed for private purposes and the IndiaAI Mission. The company’s corporate clients include construction giant L&T and food and grocery delivery platforms Zomato and Milkbasket. IITs in Indore and Guwahati and International Institutes of Information Technology (IIIT) in Hyderabad and Bangalore are its clients, too.

 

GPU deployment is yet largely restricted to premier higher education institutes, such as the IITs and the IIITs, primarily due to budget and funding constraints faced by other smaller institutes, Imran said.

 

For institutes that face a funding crunch, E2E Networks provides basic AI-Lab remote access to students so that they do not miss out on experimenting with the latest GPUs.

 

The country needs more investments in infrastructure, especially GPUs for educational institutions, along with more funding and incentives for AI companies and startups, particularly through venture capital. “I think we are doing very good technically. The fruits of AI at the population scale we have will unlock, when all of this also happens,” he said.