Krutrim, Ola’s AI venture, has launched Krutrim AI Lab, billed as India’s first AI frontier research lab, with a commitment to invest Rs 10,000 crore over the next year. This initiative aims to democratise AI research, attract top talent, and position India as a global leader in open-source AI. Krutrim also announced an immediate investment of Rs 2,000 crore (equity and debt).
Founder Bhavish Aggarwal emphasised Krutrim’s vision to develop AI tailored for India, addressing the specific challenges of Indian languages, data scarcity, and cultural context.
“With Krutrim, our vision is to develop AI for India and make it better for Indian languages, data scarcity and cultural context,” Aggarwal stated. He acknowledged the progress made in the past year and expressed hope that the AI Lab will foster collaboration within the Indian AI community to create a world-class ecosystem.
A key component of Krutrim’s strategy is building India’s largest supercomputer by the end of the year. This ambitious project will be powered by Nvidia’s GB200 cluster, which is slated to go live by March 2025, marking India’s first such deployment. This infrastructure will be crucial for developing cutting-edge AI models and supporting the research community.
Krutrim AI Lab aims to democratise AI innovation through collaborations with academia, startups, and developers. The lab will provide state-of-the-art computing resources to accelerate AI capabilities and focus on building multilingual AI models that represent India’s diverse linguistic landscape. This focus ensures equitable access to AI across all Indian languages.
Krutrim has also open-sourced several new Indic AI models, including Krutrim-2 and Krutrim-1 LLMs, Chitrarth 1 (a Vision Language Model), Dhwani 1 (a Speech Language Model), Vyakhyarth 1 (an Indic Embedding model), and Krutrim Translate 1 (a Text-to-text translation model). The company is also developing ‘BharatBench,’ a global benchmark for Indic language performance.
The lab’s research will concentrate on critical AI domains, including multimodal AI that understands text, speech, and visuals, addressing India’s data scarcity by digitising knowledge, and creating AI solutions optimised for scale and affordability in India’s resource-constrained environment.
To support its AI and cloud initiatives, Krutrim plans to scale its data center capacity to 1 GW by 2028.
The announcement comes only days after Krutrim came under the scanner for messing up its origins—yet again–following a similar controversy last year. When asked, Krutrim not only attributed its maker as OpenAI but also flagged the mention of “OpenAI” as a terms of use violation, to follow-up queries. Ola’s big AI push also comes at a time when the race is on to one-up the U.S. after China’s DeepSeek went viral.
