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Centre meets 13 firms for services under IndiaAI Mission
MeitY's technical panel met 13 companies for AI compute services under IndiaAI Mission, evaluating their capacity to support the initiative.
A technical panel of the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) on Monday individually met thirteen companies that had submitted their bids to provide AI compute and cloud services under the government’s IndiaAI Mission. In line with the tender document released in August 2024, the technical panel asked the companies about their ability to provide compute capacity for the IndiaAI Mission, HT has learnt.
The technical panel was headed by IndiaAI COO Kavita Bhatia and included officials from MeitY, National Informatics Centre (NIC), CDAC, and at least two IITs.
The thirteen companies were shortlisted from a total of 19 companies that had bid. These are Jio Platforms, Tata Communications, CtrlS Datacenters Limited, E2E Networks, Yotta Data Services, CMS Computers, Hostin Services, I2k2 Networks, Orient Technologies, Vensysco Technologies, CloudThat Technologies, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, and NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies.
To be eligible to apply, the bidders had to either submit that they had operational AI services on cloud with at least 1,000 AI compute units installed, or give an undertaking that they could do that within six months of signing an agreement with IndiaAI. The technical panel asked for details about the companies’ current capacity, expected capacity in the next six months, and the number of compute units or GPUs they could commit to the IndiaAI Mission.
While all GPUs will have to be imported as the market leader for GPU manufacturing globally is Nvidia, followed by AMD and Intel at a distant second and third, the technical panel asked if servers and other infrastructure required in the data centres would be made in India.
44%, or ₹4,563.36 crore, of the ₹10,371.92 crore ($1.25 billion) approved by the cabinet for the IndiaAI Mission in March 2024 is earmarked for providing compute capacity of more than 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) over a period of five years. This compute infrastructure will be set up as a public-private partnership, as per the RFP.
After technical evaluation and completion of the commercial bidding process, the empanelled companies will provide AI compute and cloud services. This empanelment will be valid for 36 months and can be extended for an additional 12 months.
In July, Abhishek Singh, the CEO of IndiaAI Mission, had said that to set up the compute capacity, the government wants the investment to come from private sector but the government will subsidise part of the cost of access to that capacity for “those who are building models, or training models or doing inferencing or doing research or working on algorithms”.
It will be used to provide compute capacity to start-ups, researchers, students and academics.
