In big AI push, Centre to step up compute capacity, offer free services to startups

Earlier this 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), Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar told The Indian Express.

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.

A Cabinet approval would be needed to clear the proposal, with the government 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 said.

“Under the public model, we will look to build compute capacity within the C-DAC under the National Supercomputing Mission. They already have the Rudra and Param systems and we are planning to add 1,000-2,000 GPUs to them,” Chandrasekhar said.

Rudra is an indigenous server platform built by the C-DAC which has two expansion slots for graphic cards. Param Utkarsh is a high performance computing system setup at C-DAC which offers AI over machine learning and deep learning frameworks, compute and storage as a cloud service.

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. Last May, the 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. Among the stated objectives of the policy is to modernise the government’s data collection, with an aim to improve governance and to enable artificial intelligence (AI) and data-led research and startup ecosystem in the country.

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.