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Economic Times
08-07-2025
- Business
- Economic Times
AI infra firm RackBank gets land in Indore, Raipur for data centres
AI infrastructure startup RackBank is looking to expand data centres in tier-2 cities like Indore and Raipur to reduce its operational cost by 2–3x as compared to data centre hotspots like Mumbai, Chennai and Noida. The firm, which recently launched an AI cloud business unit called NeevCloud, has acquired six acres of land in Indore for an 18 megawatt facility and 13 acres in Raipur for a 100 megawatt facility, Narendra Sen, founder and CEO of RackBank and NeevCloud, told ET. These investments are supported by state governments of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh respectively in form of power subsidies and other benefits. To maintain competitive pricing for on-demand GPUs (graphics processing units), neocloud firms need to cut fixed costs and operational costs, especially because GPUs guzzle immense power and water. For instance, land costs in Raipur are Rs 30 lakh per acre, less than a tenth of Mumbai's rates, and operational costs are equally compelling, Sen explained.'In tier-1 cities, it costs Rs 50 crore per megawatt to build. We do it for Rs 25 crore in tier-2. State governments like Madhya Pradesh are also supporting data centre companies with single window clearances and dedicated power supply. Our delivery timeline is nine months, as compared to metro cities where it can be 24 months,' he added that RackBank's in-house immersion cooling system Varuna allows it to cut capital costs by up to company is aiming to raise Rs 700 crore debt to fund this expansion. This comes after it raised a $16.5 million (nearly Rs 138 crore) equity seed round in March 2025 from D-Street investors like Ashish Kacholia and Madhulika Agarwal.'We want to become the CoreWeave of Asia Pacific,' he said, referencing the US-based AI cloud startup that recently went public after a meteoric in 2023, NeevCloud currently operates a cluster of over 700 GPUs, including Nvidia H100, H200, MI300 and plans to add the latest Blackwell GPUs in Raipur soon. NeevCloud's model focuses on enterprise AI workloads, medical diagnostics and government partnerships. 'Hyperscalers like AWS and Azure dominate the general cloud, but they don't have enough GPU capacity in India. Startups are hungry for training and inference compute, and they're willing to switch providers,' said Sen. 'We're already seeing strong traction from AI startups and healthcare firms.' On the global front, NeevCloud is also setting up presence in Europe (Finland, Norway) and the US, partnering with local data centre operators to ensure compliance and reach.'Customers expect availability. If your site shows zero GPUs, they bounce,' said Sen. 'So we're launching regions in key markets to stay competitive.'
Time of India
24-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
IndiaAI plan moves forward with over 17,000 GPUs successfully installed
Live Events 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 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 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 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 IndiaAI Mission flagged this at the review meeting on June 16. However, the companies have time till August 7 to install GPUs, they 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 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 did not respond to ET's request for comment until press time gave the cabinet approval for the Rs 10,000-crore IndiaAI Mission in March last year, with a target of procuring over 10,000 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 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 remaining 2,592 Nvidia H100 GPUs are being delivered to Sarvam by July 10 next month, he GPUs are under commissioning and performance testing by Nvidia and Yotta engineering teams, at its data centre in Navi Mumbai, before they're 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 Orient, Tata Communications, Ishan, Sify, Netmagic and the IndiaAI Mission did not respond to ET's requests for a press release on June 12, Ishan had said it will offer access to over 1,000 high-performance GPUs.
Time of India
04-06-2025
- Business
- Time of India
IndiaAI empanelment drives down prices of GPUs in second round
ETtech Live Events An analysis of the lowest (L1) prices released by the IndiaAI Mission for the second round of the tender for graphics processing units (GPU) shows an up to 10% fall in prices compared with the first first-round bidders will be asked to match these prices, resulting in substantial savings for the users. The GPUs are sourced under a government scheme to provide subsidised compute power to local artificial intelligence decline in the price of the same GPU model from the first round to the second round ranged from just Rs 4 an hour to as high as Rs 1,234 per some companies told ET that the reduced L1 rates will help kickstart artificial intelligence pilot projects in various domains, which previously may have been cost-prohibitive, others warned of a price bloodbath for GPU capacity prices are possibly the lowest in the world for GPU services, helped by the 40% government startups, developers, researchers and corporations exploring and implementing AI would be able to afford GPU capacity by leasing from the identified providers.'All existing empanelled players will be asked to match new L1 prices,' IndiaAI Mission chief executive Abhishek Singh told ET. 'From what we hear from companies, they will mostly match, to retain their priority of allocation of AI workloads.'As many as 53 categories of GPUs have been offered in the second round of the tender, out of which some are new (like Nvidia's B200 GPUs). In 16 categories, prices have reduced compared with the first said assigning AI workloads is an ongoing process and companies have six months to provision the per the IndiaAI website, 4,423 GPUs with a total subsidy of Rs 111.86 crore have been allocated so far. Compute has been allocated to 21 applicants from academia, government entities, early-stage startups, MSMEs and the student startup Sarvam AI , the first startup selected to build an indigenous foundational model under the IndiaAI Mission, has already been allocated 4,000 GPUs, Singh said. Others like Soket, Gnani and Gan are expected to give their estimate on the compute they need.'Allocation is dynamic. Companies have invested heavily in bidding for GPUs. Commitments require significant money and those in the business have done so after their assessments,' he has received the highest subsidy allocated under the programme at Rs 98.68 crore, out of a bill of Rs 246.71 crore for 4,096 Nvidia H100 GPUs, as per the IndiaAI minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Friday announced the addition of 15,916 GPUs to the existing cluster of 18,417 GPUs under the programme, taking the total to 34,333 include GPUs of Nvidia, AMD, AWS and Intel. The offering comprises 15,100 H100 Nvidia GPUs , 8,192 Nvidia B200 GPUs, 4,812 Nvidia H200 GPUs, and 1,973 Nvidia L40S GPUs.'The combination of reduced L1 rates and government support will help kickstart pilot projects in various domains, enabling more organisations to experiment with and scale AI use cases that previously may have been cost-prohibitive,' said Rishikesh Kamat, senior director, Cloud services division, at NTT Data India , one of the seven empanelled bidders in round Bairathi, chief executive of Cyfuture India, another empanelled bidder in round two, warned of lower prices creating problems for the nascent industry.'It's advantageous for users but is concerning for service providers, as a price bloodbath is on," he said. Moreover, it would be even more fatal for companies if workloads as envisaged by the IndiaAI Mission don't come through, he average L1 hourly GPU price was Rs 612.85 in the first round of empanelment against an average Rs 655.90 in the second round of empanelment. While there has been a decline in price for the same GPUs between the two rounds, the average is higher in the second round because of newer categories of GPUs.
Time of India
23-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
IndiaAI Mission GPU tender round 2: All seven shortlisted bidders clear technical round
All the seven shortlisted companies have qualified in the technical round of IndiaAI Mission's second round of graphics processing units (GPU) tender and their commercial bids were opened on Thursday afternoon, ET has L1 (lowest) price for the various GPU models offered by the bidders and the names of the L1 bidders for various GPU variants will be disclosed next week, people aware of the process selected bidders include Netmagic (now NTT Global Data Centres and Cloud Infrastructure division), Cyfuture India, Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Yotta Data Services, and Ishan Infotech. ET had reported on May 13 that the Centre has received bids proposing to offer a total of 18,000 GPUs in the second round of the IndiaAI GPU tender and that it expects 15,000 GPUs to finally be offered. Cyfuture has proposed to offer 1,184 GPUs, including Nvidia's H100, L40S and A100 GPUs, AMD's MI300 and MI325 GPUs, and Intel's Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 GPUs. It has placed purchase orders for the same, people cited above said. Vensysco has proposed to offer 2,300 GPUs: 2,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 100 AWS Trainium 1 GPUs, and 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs. Yotta has proposed to offer Nvidia Blackwell B200s. GPU models that NTT-Netmagic, Sify, Locuz and Ishan propose to offer are not known. While Vensysco and Locuz are Amazon Web Services partners , Ishan is an Oracle partner and NTT-Netmagic is a leading Google Cloud partner in India. Under the first round of the GPU tender concluded in February, IndiaAI Mission is offering 14,517 GPUs on subsidised rates to the country's startups, academics and research organisations. ET had reported on April 26 that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ( MeitY ) had assigned artificial intelligence (AI) projects, or workloads, to three companies selected to supply GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission. The government, however, has not named the beneficiaries of the programme. India gave the cabinet approval for the Rs 10,000-crore India AI Mission in March last year, with a target of creating an artificial intelligence (AI) compute infrastructure by procuring over 10,000 GPUs. As part of the mission, the government is also incentivising the development of local language models built by academia and industry with investment capital and other support. The move is aimed at building up India's AI prowess. ET reported on May 16 that the IndiaAI Mission has received 506 foundation AI model proposals across three phases. As part of the first phase of approvals, was selected to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational model. Sarvam will get access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 GPUs for six months from the IndiaAI Mission's common compute cluster to train its model.
Time of India
23-05-2025
- Business
- Time of India
IndiaAI Mission GPU tender round 2: All seven shortlisted bidders clear technical round
All the seven shortlisted companies have qualified in the technical round of IndiaAI Mission's second round of graphics processing units (GPU) tender and their commercial bids were opened on Thursday afternoon, ET has learnt. The L1 (lowest) price for the various GPU models offered by the bidders and the names of the L1 bidders for various GPU variants will be disclosed next week, people aware of the process said. The selected bidders include Netmagic (now NTT Global Data Centres and Cloud Infrastructure division), Cyfuture India, Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Yotta Data Services, and Ishan Infotech. ET had reported on May 13 that the Centre has received bids proposing to offer a total of 18,000 GPUs in the second round of the IndiaAI GPU tender and that it expects 15,000 GPUs to finally be offered. Cyfuture has proposed to offer 1,184 GPUs, including Nvidia's H100, L40S and A100 GPUs, AMD's MI300 and MI325 GPUs, and Intel's Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 GPUs. It has placed purchase orders for the same, people cited above said. Vensysco has proposed to offer 2,300 GPUs: 2,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 100 AWS Trainium 1 GPUs, and 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories Yotta has proposed to offer Nvidia Blackwell B200s. GPU models that NTT-Netmagic, Sify, Locuz and Ishan propose to offer are not known. While Vensysco and Locuz are Amazon Web Services partners , Ishan is an Oracle partner and NTT-Netmagic is a leading Google Cloud partner in India. Under the first round of the GPU tender concluded in February, IndiaAI Mission is offering 14,517 GPUs on subsidised rates to the country's startups, academics and research organisations. ET had reported on April 26 that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology ( MeitY ) had assigned artificial intelligence (AI) projects, or workloads, to three companies selected to supply GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission. The government, however, has not named the beneficiaries of the programme. India gave the cabinet approval for the Rs 10,000-crore India AI Mission in March last year, with a target of creating an artificial intelligence (AI) compute infrastructure by procuring over 10,000 GPUs. As part of the mission, the government is also incentivising the development of local language models built by academia and industry with investment capital and other support. The move is aimed at building up India's AI prowess. ET reported on May 16 that the IndiaAI Mission has received 506 foundation AI model proposals across three phases. As part of the first phase of approvals, was selected to initiate the development of an indigenous foundational model. Sarvam will get access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 GPUs for six months from the IndiaAI Mission's common compute cluster to train its model.
