‘Not either-or': India will use US GPUs and develop its own chips, says MeitY's Abhishek Singh

IT ministry additional secretary Abhishek Singh

• India-US trade deal boosts GPU imports, supports India's GPU development.
• India's sovereign GPU program is early stage; imported chips needed for now
• Deal supports India's global data center ambitions and international customers

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The India-US interim trade agreement's emphasis on expanding trade in Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) will complement, not conflict with, India's push to build its own sovereign AI hardware, according to Abhishek Singh, additional secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) and CEO of the IndiaAI Mission.

On February 7, India and USA in a joint statement committed to "significantly increase trade in technology products, including Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and other goods used in data centers".

Speaking to Moneycontrol, Singh said the trade deal simply ensures access to advanced chips and does not dilute India's long-term ambitions to develop indigenous GPUs.

"Trade deal doesn't mean only that we have access to GPUs. It does not mean that we cannot spend our research and efforts in trying to make our own GPUs,” Singh said.

He acknowledged that India’s sovereign GPU programme was still at an early stage and will take time to mature, making near-term access to imported chips essential.

"Making our own GPUs is an effort which has started, it will take some time to mature it. Till such time you need GPUs. Right," he explained.

"There will be enough space for both and India is such a huge country, there will be workloads which will need sovereign Indian GPUs. There will be some workloads which may not need it. So, it is not that it is an either/or (situation). There is enough space for both to contribute and thrive," he said.

While strategic and sensitive workloads will continue to rely on sovereign hardware, Singh said access to US GPUs under the trade framework will be crucial for international use cases.

"So, for our own strategic needs we will need sovereign GPUs. But suppose some other country wants to leverage the infrastructure here for their own applications and they want to use the GPUs that should be available. So, within that, the trade deal will be very useful," he explained.

Beyond domestic demand, Singh pointed to India's growing ambition to serve global users through large data centre and compute infrastructure investments.

He noted that many of the data centres coming up in India will not only serve Indian customers.

"A lot of the the data center investments which are coming up will be servicing customers outside India. Outside India,” he said.

"So, there will be lot of people who will be needing GPUs for doing inferencing where the end users might not be in India, might be in some other countries… Like the common compute infrastructure that we are talking of the Global South or data embassies that we are talking about," Singh said.

According to him, India is increasingly looking beyond its own market when building AI and compute capacity.

"So, ultimately this is not only about Indian customers and Indian users. We are looking at the world as a market," he said.

The India-US joint statement on the interim trade agreement positions GPUs and data centre hardware as a core pillar of technology cooperation, alongside commitments on digital trade and supply chain resilience.