San Jose: Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang, on Tuesday, expressed significant interest in participating in India’s ambitious plan to establish a 10,000-GPU processing cluster for indigenous artificial intelligence computing requirements.
As India seeks to transition from being a global IT back office to a front office for engineering, finance, marketing, and sales, artificial intelligence (AI) will play a pivotal role in reshaping the country’s workforce and opportunities, according to Nvidia founder Jensen Huang.
Huang emphasized that AI’s applications extend far beyond the back office and encompass areas such as engineering, marketing, sales, finance, and business operations. In this regard, he believes that India, with its vast talent pool, can position itself as a front office for these sectors.
Huang also emphasized the government’s clear vision of positioning India as a center for value creation rather than merely being “the back room for global firms”.
In a bid to counter GPU supply constraints and mitigate the steep acquisition costs, the Indian government on 7 March approved the allocation of $1.2 billion for several key initiatives, such as the development of domain-specific AI models, and establishing and maintaining an open-source dataset covering all 22 official Indic languages.
The Centre is also planning to establish a public-private partnership (PPP) for AI computing, granting access to 10,000 GPUs for domestic research, academia, enterprises, and startups.
Getting domestic AI development right could propel India’s rise to prominence in the global technology market, Huang said. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi told me that India should not export flour to import bread—this makes perfect sense. Why export raw material, only to import the value-added product? Why export India’s data, only to import AI?”
Data, hailed by many as the currency of the modern world, is crucial for training AI models, with GPUs playing a vital role in the infrastructure. And, India’s emergence as a market of global significance is driven by its substantial volumes of data.
