IndiaAI plan moves forward with over 17,000 GPUs successfully installed

Time of India

7 days ago

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A little over 17,300 graphics processing units (GPUs) have been successfully installed under the IndiaAI Mission 's ambitious compute infrastructure tender, which has received proposals for 34,333 GPUs across its first two rounds, people aware of the developments told ET.This was revealed at a meeting IndiaAI CEO Abhishek Singh held with all empanelled cloud service providers (CSPs) last week to review GPU installation progress, their integration with the IndiaAI compute portal, and allocation of GPU time to end users.The mission seeks to build a scalable cloud computing platform for researchers and startups to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. The third round of bidding has already concluded and the proposals are awaiting technical evaluation.Two of the ten CSPs selected in the first round — Jio Platforms and CtrlS Datacenters — are yet to deploy their GPUs, while providers like Yotta, NextGen, and E2E Networks have made significant headway in installing and commissioning GPUs, people cited above said.The IndiaAI Mission flagged this at the review meeting on June 16. However, the companies have time till August 7 to install GPUs, they said.As per the agreement, companies were to install the GPUs within six months from the issue of the letter of intent, which was sent on February 7.In a presentation at the review meeting, the IndiaAI team said CtrlS had not confirmed GPU installation although it shared purchase orders. CtrlS had also not started the API integration with the compute portal.'We are in discussions with the department to address the timelines and ensure we fulfil our commitment,' CtrlS told ET in a statement. It claimed it has 'completed the portal integration'.Jio, meanwhile, was in the process of procuring 752 Nvidia H200 GPUs and 268 AMD MI300X GPUs, according to the IndiaAI presentation. Its API integration with the compute portal was ongoing and was expected to be completed by the third quarter of 2025.Jio did not respond to ET's request for comment until press time Monday.India gave the cabinet approval for the Rs 10,000-crore IndiaAI Mission in March last year, with a target of procuring over 10,000 GPUs.As part of the mission, the government is also incentivising the development of local large language models (LLMs) built by startups like Sarvam, Gnani, Gan, and Soket AI Labs with investment capital and other support. The move is aimed at building up India's AI prowess. Yotta Data Services , the highest GPU-contributing company in the lot, has almost 50% of its GPUs installed and the delivery of the rest of its GPUs is awaited. Its API integration is complete.'We are installing and commissioning and going live with an additional 4,096 Nvidia H100 GPUs by July 10,' Sunil Gupta, chief executive of Yotta, told ET.Yotta had got allocation from IndiaAI for 4,096 Nvidia H100 GPUs for Sarvam's LLM and 200 Nvidia H100 GPUs for Bhashini in early May to drive inferencing on all its language models.'We have already delivered 1,504 Nvidia H100 GPUs to Sarvam along with an additional 108 as a redundant buffer, and 200 Nvidia H100 GPUs to Bhashini as on May 31 last month,' Gupta said.The remaining 2,592 Nvidia H100 GPUs are being delivered to Sarvam by July 10 next month, he said.These GPUs are under commissioning and performance testing by Nvidia and Yotta engineering teams, at its data centre in Navi Mumbai, before they're delivered.In the second round of empanelment, the company offered and has been empanelled for 8,192 Nvidia B200 GPUs (Blackwell GPUs).NxtGen Cloud Technologies has installed 51% of its total proposed GPUs. The remaining 49% of GPUs are under procurement, and the company expects delivery by June 30. Its API integration with the compute portal has been completed for the installed GPUs.'The demand for the Nvidia platform outweighs other options at the moment. We will be finetuning our next phase of deployment in favour of newer models from Nvidia,' AS Rajgopal, chief executive of NxtGen, told ET.'We understand that the IndiaAI Mission will take a little while to gather momentum,' he said. 'We continue to work with Nvidia, AMD and Intel to build the market. There are multiple other options emerging, specifically to run models efficiently for inference. We will be introducing three more options going forward.'Cyfuture has installed 4% GPUs while the rest 96% are under procurement. Its API integration is also under process.'We've been empanelled only a few days back and we're confident of installing committed quantities within one quarter,' Anuj Bairathi, chief executive of Cyfuture India, told ET. 'We also expect integration with the India AI portal to be completed by July.'Cyfuture emerged as L1 bidder in all categories it offered in the second round of bidding, Bairathi noted. 'Since no other companies have so far matched our pricing, we stand a chance to get the business once our installation is completed within the next three months,' he said.Locuz, Orient, Tata Communications, Ishan, Sify, Netmagic and the IndiaAI Mission did not respond to ET's requests for comments.In a press release on June 12, Ishan had said it will offer access to over 1,000 high-performance GPUs.