The Indian government has invited bids for the empanelment of entities providing artificial intelligence services on cloud under the ₹ 10,372-crore India AI mission, approved by the cabinet in March this year. Empaneled agencies, such as data centers and cloud service providers, will provide access to high-speed computing AI infrastructure like GPUs, accelerators, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), storage, etc. to academia, startups, researchers, and government bodies at the lowest rate discovered through the bidding process. Under the IndiaAI Mission, supercomputing capacity, comprising over 10,000 GPUs, will be made available to various stakeholders for creating an AI ecosystem.
The rapid development of AI worldwide has led to an increase in demand for GPU-based servers, as they can process data at a higher speed compared to CPU-based servers. India’s rate of accessing GPU-based cloud services is estimated to be double the price compared to countries with a large number of GPUs.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) has floated a bid document that requires empaneled agencies to offer high-performance computing, network, and storage services essential for implementing activities planned under the IndiaAI Mission, such as the development of indigenous LLMs and AI applications. IndiaAI will approve end users who can access these cloud-based AI services, ensuring services are provided at prices determined through a transparent and competitive process.
Eligible agencies must make available 1,000 AI compute units through their cloud service platform within six months from signing the agreement with IndiaAI. Each compute unit should have a processing speed of 15 TFLOPS (TeraFLOPS), implying a speed of performing 15 trillion floating-point calculations per second.
Get the latest news updates and stay informed with FELA NEWS!
