Centre's sovereign Al push: Compute mission may get over ₹10,000 crore

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Last Updated25/01/2024

Recently, the Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT revealed that the Indian government's AI Mission is set to seek Cabinet approval with a proposed budget exceeding Rs 10,000 crore.

To develop 'sovereign AI', enhance computational capacity domestically, and provide compute-as-a-service to Indian startups.
To harness AI for economic growth, focusing on sectors like agriculture, healthcare, and education.

The government plans to build compute capacity through a public-private partnership (PPP) model, targeting 10,000 to 30,000 GPUs.
An additional 1,000-2,000 GPUs are to be developed through the PSU Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).

Various incentive structures are being explored to encourage private companies to establish computing centres in India.
Incentive models include capital expenditure subsidies, operational expense-based incentives, and a "usage" fee.
The government envisions creating a Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) from the GPU assembly to offer startups cost-effective access to computational capacity.

Alongside computing capacity, the government is actively working on building datasets and making them available to Indian startups.
A National Data Governance Framework Policy proposes the creation of an India Datasets platform containing non-personal and anonymized datasets accessible to startups and researchers.
The government is considering directives for major tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon to share anonymized personal data with the India Datasets platform.