Nvidia to power India’s AI factories with tens of thousands of AI chips

Nvidia on Thursday announced plans to deploy tens of thousands of Hopper GPUs in India to create AI factories and collaborate with Reliance Industries to develop AI infrastructure.

Yotta Data Services, Tata Communications, E2E Networks, and Netweb will lead the AI factories — large-scale data centers for producing AI. Nvidia added that the expansion will provide nearly 180 exaflops of computing power.

Nvidia also announced a partnership with Reliance Industries to build AI infrastructure in the country during a fireside chat between CEO Jensen Huang and Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani at Nvidia’s AI Summit in Mumbai. However, the companies did not disclose the partnership details or what the AI infrastructure would entail.

“India’s leading cloud infrastructure providers and server manufacturers are ramping up accelerated data center capacity,” Nvidia said in a statement. “By year’s end, they’ll have boosted Nvidia GPU deployment in the country by nearly 10x compared to 18 months ago.”

Nvidia said it anticipates that the initiative will allow developers to leverage domestic data center resources, powerful enough to support the development of large language models, complex scientific visualizations, and industrial digital twins.

The announcements follow reports that earlier this year, Nvidia proposed a joint chip development project with India.

To benefit Indian companies and their customers

Analysts suggest that this move could grant Indian companies, government, academic institutions, and startups better access to AI resources, emphasizing the importance of making these tools available to the broader Indian ecosystem.

“Until now, there was a shortage of chips, and priority was given to bigger companies and major service providers who work with larger firms,” said Pareekh Jain, CEO of Pareekh Consulting. “This investment in providers like Yotta, cloud services like E2E, and infrastructure providers like Tata Communications and Netweb aims to democratize AI in India, especially for government research institutes, startups, and smaller Indian enterprises.”

Yotta, a data center operator, is expanding AI capabilities in India with its Shakti Cloud platform, powered by Nvidia Hopper GPUs and AI Enterprise software, Nvidia said.

“At the technology level, Yotta’s AI infrastructure will, for the first time in India, house the world’s leading compute, connectivity, storage, and networking technologies at scale, making them available in a funnel format for public, academic, R&D, and enterprise applications—resources that no individual user could afford on their own,” said Danish Faruqui, CEO of Fab Economics.

Tata Communications is rolling out Nvidia Hopper GPUs on a large scale to enhance its public cloud infrastructure, supporting diverse AI applications. The company plans to introduce Nvidia Blackwell GPUs next year to further boost AI performance.

E2E Networks is extending its reach to enterprises in India, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and the US with GPU-powered cloud servers optimized for high-performance tasks. Netweb is enhancing its AI offerings with an expansion of Tyrone AI systems, targeting enterprises and supercomputing centers in India and across Asia.

Jain believes the investment will help Indian tech companies become more AI-savvy, enabling some of their solutions to cater to a global market.

“India is already emerging as a SaaS capital, and the startup ecosystem here is very vibrant, similar to when the mobile wave hit 10 years ago,” Jain said. “Some AI startups from India could make a global impact. The second aspect is that as Indian enterprises become more AI-focused, AI solutions from abroad will find a larger market in India.”

Deployments for India’s IT services sector

In a separate statement, Nvidia said that it is partnering with Indian IT giants, including Infosys, TCS, Tech Mahindra, and Wipro, to drive AI adoption.

“India’s IT consulting giants are helping clients deploy AI with custom-built solutions that use the Nvidia AI Enterprise software platform,” the company said. “Clients can use these generative AI applications that include virtual agents that can learn, reason, and take action to drive new levels of productivity and foster breakthroughs to help solve complex challenges across healthcare, climate, agriculture, manufacturing, and more.”

The company said consulting experts are developing custom models using Nvidia NeMo and deploying AI in production with Nvidia NIM microservices.

“NeMo Curator is playing a key role in enabling consulting experts to train highly accurate sovereign AI for India and neighboring Southeast Asian countries,” the company stated. “With NeMo Curator, consulting companies are processing high-quality data at scale in these low-resource languages and generating synthetic data to augment their existing datasets.”

AI capabilities that support advanced cognitive functions such as reasoning, perception, learning, and decision-making, along with progress in data analytics and computing power, offer significant opportunities to expand IT services, according to Faruqui.

“Such a transformation of IT services towards cognitive services that build upon real-time data collection, aggregation, analytics, and compute will result in high-value and specialized jobs for the Indian IT industry,” Faruqui said. “In addition, this expansion of the Indian IT industry will shift it from a services-based model to a product-driven one, leveraging emerging use cases within India.”

Source:: Network World