The government spending on the IndiaAI mission will increase to Rs 20,000-crore from the current Rs 10,000 crore, owing to additions of certain components, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, minister of state for electronics and IT said on Monday evening.
“The mission approved by the Cabinet had an outlay of Rs 10,000 crore but the effective value will go up to Rs 20,000 crore on addition of some other things,” Chandrasekhar said. He, however, did not disclose what other things will be added.
The AI mission pertains to bringing AI compute capacity under the public-private partnership (PPP) mode through GPU-based servers, allocating early-stage funding to deeptech startups, setting up of innovation centres and developing broader AI sovereign infrastructure in the country.
Chandrasekhar’s statement assumes significance as to create compute infrastructure in the country, the government is expected to have its own AI data centres, which can then be given to startups on a lease kind of a model.
Meity has set a target to make available atleast 10,000 GPUs by March 2026, which are approved under the IndiaAI Mission.
Initially, the government is expected to source the GPUs from companies like Nvidia, and an additional funding outlay may be required to support the requirement of GPUs and create compute capacity, officials said.
Last week, ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) secretary S Krishnan said that the government is looking to fund up to 50% of the cost of creating artificial intelligence (AI) compute infrastructure in the country.
GPUs are essential for creating AI models as these require large-scale computing, which cannot be done by central processing units (CPUs).
In a bid to make the process faster, the government is also looking at the viability gap funding approach or a voucher-based mechanism for the sector.
The minister said the next government will focus on areas such as electronics and micro-electronics, telecom, high-performance computing, semiconductors, cybersecurity, the future of the internet, and areas like automotive and electric vehicles (EVs).
“The digital economy in India today is growing at 2.8x the regular GDP (gross domestic product). It was 4.5% of GDP in 2014, it is 12% of GDP today, and it will be a fifth of the GDP by 2026-27,” Chandrasekhar said, adding that India will be a $1 trillion digital economy by 2027-28.
For the government’s own use of compute infrastructure, it is planning an independent capacity through the National supercomputing mission and the GPU capacity under India AI mission will be set up separately.
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