The government is preparing to buy 1,000 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) as part of the IndiaAI Mission.

About IndiaAI Mission

• IndiaAI is a government-backed initiative aimed at boosting artificial intelligence (AI) research and development in India.
• Objective of IndiaAI Mission
  • The mission, with a budget of Rs 10,370 crore, aims to establish a massive infrastructure of over 10,000 GPUs to support AI development. 
    • This includes training AI models with over 100 billion parameters on datasets that cover major Indian languages, benefiting sectors like healthcare, agriculture, and governance.
  • The focus is to provide cloud-based AI services to academia, MSMEs, start-ups, researchers, and government agencies, which would otherwise be too expensive for them to develop AI systems
    • It includes other entities such as researchers, public sector agencies, and other approved entities.
      • These services will be hosted by data centres located within India to ensure that all data remains within the country.

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Key Components of the IndiaAI Mission

• Computing Infrastructure: The government plans to build a massive computing infrastructure capable of handling complex AI models and workloads. This infrastructure will be made available to researchers, startups, and public sector agencies.
• Data Localization: To ensure data privacy and security, the government has mandated that all AI services must be delivered from data centres located within India. 
  • This means that user data will not be transferred outside the country.
• Public-Private Partnership: The project will use a public-private partnership model with 50% viability gap funding. 
  • If costs decrease, private entities will be required to provide additional compute capacity within the allocated budget. Rs 4,564 crore of the total budget is allocated for building the necessary computing infrastructure.

Benefits of the IndiaAI Mission

• Boost to AI Research and Development: By providing access to advanced computing resources, the mission will enable researchers to develop cutting-edge AI models and applications.
• Support for Startups: Startups can leverage the mission’s resources to build and scale their AI-powered products and services.
• Strengthening Public Sector Agencies: Government agencies can use AI to improve their efficiency and effectiveness in areas such as healthcare, agriculture, and governance.
• Promoting Data Privacy and Security: The data localization requirement ensures that sensitive user data remains within India, protecting it from unauthorised access.