India needs to have AI sovereignty: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

NVIDIA announced partnerships with Reliance and the Tata Group

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang wholeheartedly backed the idea of India having sovereignty over its AI capabilities, because the country has its own sovereign needs.

“The country itself has sovereign needs. It has data that the country needs to process and wants to process. It has national security reasons maybe. It needs to advance the infrastructure, irrespective of the profitability of companies,” he said.

He likened it to the power grid or road infrastructure because of the crucial role it plays, irrespective of profitability.

While he stated that this (AI sovereignty) didn’t come up in his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he said it will come up naturally going forward.

Read: NVIDIA inks partnerships with Reliance and Tata to bring advanced AI technology to India

Huang’s comments are similar to that of IBM’s Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna’s, who said that India must develop sovereign capability in artificial intelligence (AI) and look at setting up a national AI computing centre. Krishna had said India might want to use it for purposes that the rest of the world does not want to invest in, or where the country does not want to expose it to the rest of the world. “You need a way for the government and for private companies to be able to leverage that in a way that is unique to India,” Krishna had said.

Huang, who met with PM Modi on September 4 as part of his visit to India, said that the company would like to work on accelerating the development of AI infrastructure, upskilling engineers, and partnering with Indian companies to upskill the country's IT workforce to create the world's largest AI workforce.

“You will export more AI expertise than any country in the world. It potentially could be your largest export,” Huang said.

To that effect, the company announced partnerships with Reliance as well as the Tata Group on August 8.

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