Context:
Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that India will develop multiple sovereign AI foundation models within 8 to 10 months. This comes as China’s DeepSeek AI model gains global attention.
Governments AI Strategy GPU Procurement
- India AI Mission
- Cost Efficiency
- The rate of a GPU is set at Rs.115.85 per hour for low end and Rs.150 per hour for high end. This is significantly cheaper than the global benchmark of $2.5–$3 per GPU hour.
- Financial Support
- Direct central funding equity based funding to encourage private investment.
- 40% discount for startups, researchers and educational institutions.
- Long term users 6 months or more may get additional discounts.
- Competing with DeepSeek Global AI Leaders
- Chinas DeepSeek recently built an AI model at a fraction of global costs raising concerns.
- India will host DeepSeek on its servers and thereby mitigate risks associated with privacy and data security.
- Indias AI Models vs Global Benchmarks
- DeepSeek was trained on 2,000 GPUs.
- ChatGPT4 was trained on 25,000 GPUs.
- The procurement of 18,693 GPUs by India is a strong foundation for competing in AI development.
- Evaluation Criteria for AI Model Developers
- Companies will be evaluated based on
- Technical ability and methodology.
- Applicability of the use cases to India agriculture education climate change etc.
- Companies will be evaluated based on
- Ethical implications and scalability
- Financial feasibility and sustainability of the models.
- Indigenously Developing GPU AI related Applications
- India is actively developing indigenous GPUs to reduce reliance on foreign technology.
- 18 AI applications have been selected for funding focusing on:
- Agriculture
- Learning disability solutions
- Climate change mitigation
