The government will develop more than 500 data labs under the IndiaAI Mission to boost talent and infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI), IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on September 18 speaking at the pre-event of AI Impact Summit 2026.
"We will be developing more than 500 data labs across the country under the IndiaAI mission," Vaishnaw announced.
This comes as part of the broader India AI Mission announcements, for which the government has selected eight new players to develop LLMs, Vaishnaw said while speaking in New Delhi. Names include 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.
Why do data labs matter?
The IndiaAI Mission, cleared earlier this year with a Rs 10,300-crore outlay, is the Centre’s push to build sovereign AI capabilities. The plan includes sovereign large language models (LLMs), GPUs, skilling initiatives, and sector-specific AI use cases.
Key details of the announcement
Apart from the 500 data labs, an AI framework will also be launched within 10 days by MeitY and the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser. Vaishnaw announced that sector-specific small language models (SLMs) will target agriculture, weather forecasting, manufacturing, logistics, and transportation.
Setting aside the current stock of 34,000 GPUs, Vaishnaw has directed IndiaAI Mission CEO Abhishek Singh to explore the addition of 10,000 more GPUs.
"The world has to come together for a common governance framework for AI. Will it result in a framework in a year? I don’t know,” Vaishnaw said.
Why is IndiaAI Mission important?
The sovereign LLM project is important to the IndiaAI Mission. It is designed to train models on Indian datasets and languages.
As reported by Moneycontrol earlier, the government has begun selecting multiple firms, including IT services players and AI startups, to contribute to building the sovereign model. Officials indicated that onboarding would happen in phases to leverage both compute and domain expertise.
The mission also earmarks funding for AI startups and accelerators.
What are sovereign LLMs?
Large language models trained on Indian datasets and languages, built to reduce dependence on global AI models.
Why are GPUs important for AI?
GPUs provide the compute power required to train and deploy large AI models. India currently has 34,000 GPUs allocated under the mission.
When will the AI framework be released?
Within the next 10 days, according to Vaishnaw.
Which sectors will benefit first?
Agriculture, manufacturing, weather forecasting, logistics, and transportation are priority areas for sector-specific language models.
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