As part of the India AI Mission, the government has selected eight new players to develop a foundational Large Language Model (LLM), IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said while speaking at the AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi on September 18, with names including Tech Mahindra, Fractal Analytics, and BharatGen - an IIT Bombay Consortium, among others.
The LLM that is proposed to be developed by IIT Bombay is expected to have 1 trillion parameters. In LLM parlance, 'parameters' refer to number of learned internal variables — or biases — that capture patterns and relationships in language from training data. For IIT Bombay's proposed LLM, the IndiaAI Mission is allocated financial assistance of Rs 988.6 crore.
The additional entities selected today for development of foundational LLM under the India AI Mission are:
1. Avataar AI
2. IIT Bombay Consortium - BharatGen
3. Fractal Analytics Limited
4. Tech Mahindra Ltd
5. Zeinteiq Aitech Innovations
6. Genloop Intelligence Pvt Ltd
7. NeuroDX (Intellihealth)
8. Shodh AI
Tech Mahindra welcomed the announcement and said it is 'proud to be recognized' as a key player in the IndiaAI Mision to build foundation models.
"This announcement comes on the back of building our and India's own Indic LLM, Project Indus. Built completely in-house and at frugal cost, the journey of having Project Indus as open source to creating sovereign LLM's has been a learning and rewarding experience," Tech Mahindra said.
On May 30, 2025, the government had announced three more startups selected to build India’s first home-grown artificial intelligence (AI) foundational model, namely, SoketAI, Gnani.ai, and Gan AI. Earlier, in April 2025, four startups were selected to focus on a specific type of AI models, including Sarvam AI. To support these AI models, the government has also partnered with cloud and data service providers, to ensure access to GPUs.
Minister Vaishnaw said the models that were selected earlier are progressing 'really well' and he is confident that India will have a model or models by the time the AI Impact Summit gets underway in February 2026.
The government will also be launching an AI framework in the next 10 days, which MeitY has been working on along with the office of the principal scientific advisor.
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