Centre’s sovereign AI push: Compute mission may get over Rs 10,000 crore outlay

“We will take the proposal for the AI Mission to the Cabinet soon. We are still working out some contours, but the overall outlay for the initiative could be more than Rs 10,000 crore,” he said.

The Indian Express had earlier reported the capacity building will be done both within the government and through a public-private partnership model, highlighting New Delhi’s intention to reap dividends of the impending AI boom which it envisions will be a crucial economic driver.

Last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the AI Mission and said its aim was to establish the computing powers of AI within the country. This, he said, will provide better services to startups and entrepreneurs and also promote AI applications in the sectors of agriculture, healthcare and education.

In total, the country is looking to build a compute capacity of anywhere between 10,000 GPUs (graphic processing units) and 30,000 GPUs under the PPP model, and an additional 1,000-2,000 GPUs through the PSU Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Chandrasekhar had earlier told this paper.

For context, according to a 2020 blog by Microsoft, the company had developed a supercomputer for OpenAI – the firm behind ChatGPT – which consisted of 10,000 GPUs among other things.

The government is exploring various incentive structures for private companies to set up computing centres in the country – ranging from a capital expenditure subsidy model which has been employed under the semiconductor scheme, a model where companies can be incentivised depending on their operational expenses, to offering them a “usage” fee, Chandrasekhar had said.

Computing capacity, or compute, is among the most important elements of building a large AI system apart from algorithmic innovation and datasets. It is also one of the most difficult elements to procure for smaller businesses looking to train and build such AI systems.

The government’s idea is to create a digital public infrastructure (DPI) out of the GPU assembly it sets up so that startups can utilise its computational capacity for a fraction of the cost, without needing to invest in GPUs which are often the biggest cost centre of such operations.

Apart from building computing capacities, the government is also working on building datasets and making them available to Indian startups.In May 2022, the Information Technology (IT) Ministry released a draft of the National Data Governance Framework Policy under which it proposed the creation of an India Datasets platform, which will consist of non-personal and anonymised datasets from Central government entities that have collected data from Indian citizens or those in India.

The idea is that the non-personal data housed within this programme would be accessible to startups and Indian researchers, the draft proposal said.

The Indian Express had earlier reported that the Centre is also considering issuing a directive to big tech companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon to share anonymised personal data in their possession with the India Datasets platform.