New Delhi: The Union Cabinet on Thursday cleared “India artificial intelligence or AI Mission” with an outlay of over Rs 10,300 crore for five years. The approved corpus will be used to build a high-end scalable AI ecosystem in public-private partnership mode. Besides, public AI compute infrastructure of 10,000 or more GPUs will be established for catalysing AI innovation in this mission.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched the Mission last year. The objective of this mission will be to maximise the potential of AI computing in India and provide Indian start-ups and innovators with better opportunities in the area of healthcare, education and agriculture in the country.
After the Cabinet meeting Union minister Piyush Goyal told reporters that the Cabinet approved the India AI Mission with an outlay of Rs 10,372 crore for five years to encourage AI development in the country. “With this outlay, one very ambitious India AI Mission that will encourage AI segment and ongoing research in this field,” Mr Goyal said.
However, a government statement also said that under the India AI program, support would also be given to accelerate deeptech AI startups additionally. “Work will also be taken up to implement responsible AI projects including development of indigenous tools and frameworks, and so on,” the statement added.
The mission will be implemented through the IndiaAI Independent Business Division (IBD) under Digital India Corporation (DIC). “Supercomputing capacity, comprising over 10,000 GPUs (graphics processing unit), will be made available to various stakeholders for creating an AI ecosystem,” the minister said.
The demand for GPU-based servers has increased as they can process data at a higher speed compared to CPU-based servers. “Howevber, start-ups, academia, researchers and industry will be given access to the AI supercomputing infrastructure established under the India AI Mission,” he said.
Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar on social media platform X also said that AI is poised to be the kinetic enabler for India’s digital economy. “This program will catalyse India's AI ecosystem and position it as a force shaping the future of AI for India and the world. AI is one of the greatest inventions of our time and India will play a major role in shaping its future. That is ModiKiGuarantee,” Mr Chandrasekhar said, adding that the mission will benefit states like Kerala, which, for years, missed the bus in creating a robust tech ecosystem.
Under this mission, an India AI Innovation Centre (IAIC) will be set up and IAIC will be a leading academic institution, ensuring streamlined implementation and retention of top research talent. Funds approved by the Cabinet will enable IAIC to spearhead the development and deployment of foundational models, with a specific emphasis on indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and domain-specific models, leveraging edge and distributed computing for optimal efficiency.
An official statement, however, said that the proposal also includes funding provisions for industry-led AI projects aimed at fostering social impact, propelling innovation and entrepreneurship. “A national data management office will be set up under the mission that will coordinate with various government departments and ministries to improve the quality of data and make them available for AI development and deployment,” it said.
Working groups formed by the government on AI have recommended setting up a three-tier compute infrastructure, comprising 24,500 graphics processing units (GPUs). At present, the US and China lead in computing infrastructure required for the development of AI technology.
In the race to develop AI capacity, Microsoft provided Open AI with a $1 billion investment in 2019 and a $10 billion (about Rs 82,000 crore) investment in 2023. Besides, IBM alone invested $6.5 billion (about Rs 5300 crore) in research, development and engineering to innovate in the field of AI, hybrid cloud and emerging areas, such as quantum in 2022.
