Re-skilling techies, compute capacity & geopolitics in focus for second IndiaAI report

Time of India

8 hours ago

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Jobs displacement due to adoption of artificial intelligence , re-skilling of the tech workforce, raising compute power and addressing geopolitical challenges are some of the issues that are expected to be among the main agendas ahead of the government as it prepares for the second edition of the IndiaAI report , officials said.The report is planned to be readied before the key AI Impact Summit that India will chair in New Delhi in February 2026. Requests for feedback submission will soon go out to all central ministries, autonomous bodies as well as state governments, officials at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said.Unveiled in October 2023, the first IndiaAI report had laid out the full fulcrum of India's AI aspirations, with detailed inputs from seven working groups. These had recommended the setting up of 3 AI centres of excellence, development of large, multimodal AI foundation models trained on Indian languages and datasets, and driving cross-sector development in areas like health, agriculture, education and governance through AI."The previous report had laid out the foundational strategy and roadmap for India's national approach to artificial intelligence. The next one is planned to build on it to further fine tune targets to meet the goals under the Viksit Bharat 2047 initiative," an official said.With the approval of the IndiaAI Mission, the government had allocated Rs 10,300 crore over five years beginning March 2024 to strengthen AI capabilities. The upcoming report may call for augmenting that amount considering the central position that AI has acquired in innovation and governance since then, he said.The government wants solutions to emerge for large-scale re-skilling of the technological workforce, much of which in India's IT industry remains anxious of retrenchments due to AI. Similar to last time, senior executives from the private sector and academicians are expected to be part of the working groups that will give recommendations for the report.Establishing computing power would also be a key focus, people in the know said. While the government had initially targeted the development of a high-end common computing facility equipped with 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs), India has successfully overshot the mark by empanelling 34,333 GPUs through the IndiaAI Compute platform . But the government is wary of export controls on critical hardware being placed by foreign governments, specifically the US.Under the previous Joe Biden administration's Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Framework, the US had placed India among Tier-2 countries with a volume cap of 50,000 H100-equivalent GPUs through 2027. Under Donald Trump, US' new AI policy has called for exporting the full US AI technology stack to 'allied nations' willing to join America's AI alliance, but also stresses on denying foreign adversaries access to US compute power citing geostrategic competition and national security. These two categories are not defined, and India would need to quickly find its feet, an official said."This and other geopolitical challenges such as the rapidly evolving AI power dynamics beyond nations have pushed the government to hold the summit in India next year,' this official said. 'It will build on the 2025 AI Action Summit in Paris co-chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It will showcase India's emerging leadership in creating consensus for global AI governance frameworks ."