In big Al push, Centre to step up compute capacity, offer free services to startups
- The Indian government is embarking on an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Mission to develop its own 'sovereign AI.'
- Objective: To enhance computational capacity in India and provide compute-as-a-service to Indian startups.
- The government envisions AI as a crucial economic driver and plans to leverage the impending AI boom for economic growth.
Compute Capacity Building
- The government intends to build computational capacity through both government initiatives and public-private partnerships.
- India aims to build a compute capacity
- Between 10,000 and 30,000 GPUs (graphic processing units) under the PPP model
- An additional 1,000-2,000 GPUs through the PSU Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC)
- The government is exploring incentive structures to encourage private companies to set up computing centres in the country.
- These include capital expenditure subsidies, operational expense incentives and usage fees.
Public-Private Partnership Model
- Objective: To create a digital public infrastructure (DPI) from the GPU assembly.
- This will allow startups to utilize computational capacity at a lower cost without investing in GPUs, a significant expense for AI operations.
- In addition, the government also aims to make datasets available to Indian startups.
- A draft National Data Governance Framework Policy proposes the creation of an India Datasets platform.
- It makes non-personal and anonymized datasets accessible to startups and researchers.
- The government is considering directives for big tech companies to share anonymized personal data with the India Datasets platform.
Prelims Takeaway
- Sovereign AI
- Compute Capacity Building
- Public-Private Partnership Model
- National Data Governance Framework Policy