In March, 2024, the Government of India launched its AI mission. An allocation of Rs.10372 crore was approved by the Union Cabinet. The idea is to make available compute capacity (consisting of GPU chips) under public-private partnership. At the same time, there should be funding of startups and setting up of innovation centers. All this will create AI sovereign infrastructure.

Compute power will be made available to innovators, startups, students and educational institutes. Guidelines will be framed for the scheme. There would be proper selection of startups.

Initially, the government will invest in 10000 plus GPU chips. These will be used to train neural networks. There is a proposal to set up a three-tier infrastructure consisting of 24,500 GPUs at 17 centers.

Nvidia is the supplier of GPUs and commands 88 per cent of market share. Due to high demand, there is a waiting time of 12-18 months in getting GPUs from the company.

The focus will not be restricted to generative AI, but will be also on real-life use cases in healthcare, agriculture, governance, language translation etc.

There will be focus on AI skilling. The government has signed on MoU with IBM in AI skilling. Nvidia is also co-operating with the government by working with Indian companies such as Reliance, Tata and Infosys to help develop sovereign AI infrastructure. There will be more courses of AI in colleges and universities for skill development. There will be a focus on the development of indigenous foundational models and indigenous tools.

Datasets will be created of anonymised data. The models will use anonymised data for training. Misuse of public data will be avoided by allowing only those companies which are building trusted AI models to access publicly available data.