AI mission projects may get 50% subsidy, says Meity secy

Meity has set a target to make available GPU-based servers approved under the IndiaAI Mission by March 2026.

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Meity has set a target to make available GPU-based servers approved under the IndiaAI Mission by March 2026. (Reuters)

The government is looking to fund up to 50% of the cost of creating artificial intelligence (AI) compute infrastructure in the country under the Rs 10,372 crore IndiaAI mission, ministry of electronics and IT (MeitY) secretary S Krishnan said on Friday.

The AI mission basically 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.

Meity has set a target to make available GPU-based servers approved under the IndiaAI Mission by March 2026.

“The target is to establish at least 10,000 GPUs worth of AI compute capacity in the country…In order to speed up the entire process, the idea is to partner with a variety of private institutions so that we are able to work with the private sector in making this capacity available quickly,” Krishnan said at the CII Annual Business Summit.

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.

“We want to make it (AI compute) available both on a VGF (viability gap funding) basis where new capacity will be created, and there would be viability gap funding from the government or alternatively,” Krishnan said.

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.

On large language models (LLMs) specific to India, Krishnan said, “Now people are talking about large language models, large multimodal models. Some of them are becoming smaller and more efficient. A number of those efforts are going on in our conversations with the industry, private sector, and with a variety of experts”.

When asked about concern around job loss due to AI, Krishnan said, “Many people feel that the newer AI jobs which will come, will get created in India for two or three reasons. One, we have a large number of STEM-trained graduates, many of whom have exposure to AI far more than any other country in the world.”

With sovereign AI and an AI compute infrastructure, the government is not looking to just compete with the generative AI type of model, but looking to focus on real-life use cases in healthcare, agriculture, governance, language translation, etc, to maximise economic development.

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This article was first uploaded on May eighteen, twenty twenty-four, at forty-five minutes past twelve in the night.
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