GPU Gold Rush: Indian Government Fuels AI Boom with 100% Compute Subsidy

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India has made a revolutionary push towards artificial intelligence by declaring a 100% waiver on compute infrastructure expenses for startups working on building foundational AI models. This groundbreaking decision, under the IndiaAI Mission, is to catalyze domestic innovation and make India an AI superpower of the world.

Complete Compute Subsidy for Foundation Models:

The government will be subsidizing 100% of computing and GPU costs for companies developing core AI models—core technologies like large language models (LLMs) that enable advanced AI applications. This is a massive increase from the existing 40% subsidy, which will remain available for other GPU-intensive applications like inference and app development.

Four Startups Selected:

The first recipients are Sarvam, GAN.ai, Gnani.ai, and Soket. Sarvam has already been given 4,096 NVIDIA H100 SXM GPUs, the largest to date, while the other three co-founders will also receive access to the same resources to train their models.

Massive Pool of GPUs and Investment:

Over 34,000 GPUs have been empaneled, on which over ₹111 crore has already been spent on subsidies. The government's vision is to facilitate high-performance computing for the startup community, researchers, and the government.

Ambitious Model Development:

Sarvam: Building a 120-billion-parameter sovereign LLM for national initiatives such as "2047: Citizen Connect.".
Soket AI: Developing an open-source 120-billion-parameter Indian language-specific model with a mission towards defense, health, and education sectors.
Gnani.ai: Developing 14-billion-parameter multilingual voice AI model for real-time speech processing.
GAN.ai: Training a 70-billion-parameter multilingual text-to-speech model with "superhuman" capacity.

IndiaAI Mission's Vision:

With a budget of ₹10,372 crore for five years, the mission seeks to develop a strong AI ecosystem, raise local talent, and make India's AI models local language- and condition-sensitive.

Industry Impact: Experts opine that this move will not only speed up basic model development but also spur actual AI applications, making India a center of AI innovation and minimizing dependence on imported technology.

Source: Moneycontrol, NewsBytes, Outlook Business, Economic Times, Inc42, APAC News Network.