India will likely become a major AI superpower within the next four to five years, said Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India.
Speaking to Moneycontrol on the sidelines of TiE Delhi NCR’s India Internet Day 2024, Jain said, "India is one of the largest social media markets and the second-largest mobile market in the world. So it makes sense for India to play a big role in AI."
"India can definitely be one of the largest countries, not only in terms of consumption but also in terms of building AI applications and models, especially given the kind of talent we have," he added.
Jain emphasised that India will likely become one of the largest consumers and producers of AI, emerging as a major AI superpower.
Earlier this month, G42 unveiled a new large language model (LLM) called NANDA, specifically designed for Hindi-speaking users. Jain mentioned that the company plans to launch the LLM later this year or early next year.
Read: Abu Dhabi’s G42 plans AI-focussed large data centers, supercomputer, Hindi LLM: India CEO
NANDA, developed jointly by G42 subsidiary Inception, Cerebras Systems, and researchers from the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in the UAE, will feature 13 billion parameters. It has been trained on approximately 2.13 trillion language dataset tokens, including Hindi.
G42 also plans to build up to 2 gigawatts of AI-ready data centres in India—double the country's current total capacity, as part of a pact signed between the UAE and Indian governments to co-develop sovereign AI. In addition, the company plans to construct a supercomputer with eight exaFLOPS of capacity in India.
Regarding G42's international expansion, Jain said that India will play a significant role in the company's global growth.
On data sovereignty, Jain said: "We want to ensure 100% compliance with data sovereignty regulations. From a user data perspective, we are committed to adhering to all norms regarding data protection and data sovereignty. For users building applications on top of the Nanda model, we aim to provide an option for them to download the model to their own premises whether in their own data centre or machine. They can build a customised version, and we can assist in training it on their own data. The data would not leave their premises, let alone cross national borders—it stays entirely within their own data centre."
Jain added that the company is open to working with Indian startups and IT service providers such as Infosys, Wipro and TCS.
"Each market, has its own local needs and nuances, and companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS, etc, all these companies would probably know much better than what we do. So if there's an opportunity to collaborate and co-develop something with any of them, why not? We would love to do it," he said.
Since its founding in 2018, G42 has partnerships with major firms such as OpenAI, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and Cerebras.
G42 has received investments from global technology investors Mubadala and Silver Lake. In April 2024, Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42, and Microsoft's Vice Chair and President Brad Smith joined the G42 Board.
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