NEW DELHI: The Indian government has announced a new initiative under the Rs 10,372-crore India AI Mission, inviting bids for the empanelment of entities to provide artificial intelligence (AI) services via cloud computing. This initiative, approved by the cabinet in March, aims to enhance the AI infrastructure available to various stakeholders, including academia, startups, researchers, and government bodies.

Empaneled agencies, such as data centers and cloud service providers, will be required to offer access to high-speed AI computing resources. This includes graphics processing units (GPUs), accelerators, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and storage solutions. The goal is to provide these services at the lowest possible rates, as determined through a competitive bidding process.

Under the India AI Mission, a supercomputing capacity featuring over 10,000 GPUs will be allocated to support the development of an AI ecosystem. Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary at MeitY, shared on social media that IndiaAI, an initiative under Digital India Corporation, is responsible for this empanelment process.

The growing global demand for AI has increased the need for GPU-based servers, which offer faster data processing compared to traditional CPU-based servers. In India, the cost of accessing GPU-based cloud services is currently about twice as high as in countries with extensive GPU installations.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has outlined in the bid document that the selected agencies will need to provide high-performance computing, networking, and storage services essential for the India AI Mission. This includes developing indigenous large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and other AI applications.

IndiaAI will approve which end users can access these cloud-based AI services, ensuring that they are offered at competitive prices through a transparent process. The selected AI service providers will be contracted for a 36-month period, with the option for extension based on agreed terms.

The document clarifies that this invitation is for receiving proposals from interested bidders, not an offer to enter into a procurement agreement. IndiaAI will cover the costs of AI services for approved projects based on the approved subsidy.

Eligible bidders must provide 1,000 AI compute units via their cloud platforms within six months of signing the agreement with IndiaAI. Each compute unit should have a processing speed of at least 15 TFLOPS (15 trillion floating-point calculations per second), a benchmark currently achieved by GPUs or Google's TPUs.

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