The government’s `10,372 crore AI programme to build compute infrastructure, along with the push from businesses to convert data centres into compute units, gives India a huge opportunity to be the AI factory of the world, according to Vishal Dhupar, Nvidia’s managing director in South Asia.
Dhupar, who was speaking at the Startup Mahakumbh on Monday, said, “converting data centres into compute units will produce intelligence.” “In the past… you put water on one side, electricity came out on the other side. Now you will put data on this side and intelligence will come out. So this is an opportunity for India to really be the AI factory of the world.”Under the IndiaAI programme, the government will create public AI compute infrastructure of 10,000 or more GPUs, required for AI innovation, in a public, private, partnership mode.
Currently, AI research in India is approximately at sub-2%, compared to a share of about 58-59% of China and US combined.“Even if you look at (contribution to research) from the GDP perspective, we do about a percentage of our GDP. US does about 4%, and China does 4-4.5% of its GDP. So they are spending money on research, but it’s coming through the infrastructure that helps people to do their work. And that’s why infrastructure is super critical,” Dhupar said.
NVIDIA has also been partnering with Indian businesses to work on AI-related innovation. One such partnership is with Mumbai-based Yotta Data Services, which has procured 16,000 GPUs. “It’s going to be the state of the art data centre. It’s exactly the same architecture, as we used for our own engineers. I physically saw the machines coming into the country last week. They will quickly get built up,” Dhupar said.
The US-based firm dominates the GPU market with about 88% market share and there is a lag of 12-18 months in getting GPUs from the company due to its high demand across the globe.
