The world's hottest chip company NVIDIA announced partnerships with two giant Indian conglomerates — Reliance Industries and Tata Group — on September 8, making it a significant push not just in terms of building AI infrastructure for India but also in reskilling and upskilling a bulk of the country’s tech workforce.
With Reliance Industries, NVIDIA said it would be building India’s own foundation large language model (LLM) trained on diverse languages, which are built for India. In a statement, Jio Platforms said that the new AI cloud infrastructure will “enable researchers, developers, startups, scientists, AI practitioners and others across India to access accelerated computing and high-speed, secure cloud networking to run workloads safely and with extreme energy efficiency”.
As part of this, NVIDIA will provide Jio with end-to-end AI supercomputer technologies including CPU, GPU, networking, and AI operating systems and frameworks for building the AI models, and Jio will manage and maintain the AI cloud infrastructure.
“As India advances from a country of data proliferation to creating technology infrastructure for widespread and accelerated growth, computing and technology super centres like the one we envisage with NVIDIA will provide the catalytic growth just like Jio did to our nation’s digital march,” said Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Limited.
With the Tata Group, NVIDIA has a three-pronged plan: building and processing generative AI applications as well as upskilling the six lakh-plus employees of India’s largest IT Services company, TCS, in AI; working with Tata Motors to deploy AI across design, styling, engineering, simulation testing and autonomous vehicle capabilities; and help Tata Communications build AI infra.
Jio Infocomm Chairman Akash Ambani said the two companies will develop an advanced AI cloud infrastructure that is “secure, sustainable, and are deeply relevant to India's unique opportunities.”
“This state-of-the-art platform will be a catalyst in accelerating AI-driven innovations across sectors, from healthcare and education to enterprise solutions. Our vision is to make AI accessible to researchers, start-ups, and enterprises across the nation, thereby accelerating India's journey towards becoming an AI powerhouse,” Akash said.
Tata Sons Chairman N Chandrasekharan said that advancements in AI have made it central priority in governments, industries and societies at large.
"Our partnership with NVIDIA will democratize access to AI infrastructure, accelerate build-out of AI solutions and enable upgradation of AI talent at scale. Tata Group’s presence across sectors coupled with NVIDIA’s deep capabilities offers numerous opportunities for collaboration to advance India’s AI ambition," he said.
Clad in his trademark black biker jacket, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang spoke to journalists in Bengaluru that the plan is to build supercomputers.
“In the case of Reliance, they're going to use it to create generative AI services for their 450 million customers. In the case of Tata, Tata Communications is going to create infrastructure,” he said.
This infrastructure that Tata Communications will be building is to support AI companies in India right now that are looking for infrastructure.
“They're all clamouring for supply, access to infrastructure. They're flying all over the world looking for infrastructure around the world, they might have to export their engineers to go work in California, so they can have infrastructure there. There's no reason to do that. Build the infrastructure here, the engineers don't have to leave,” he said.
Meeting with PM Modi
This comes in the same week that the NVIDIA chief met Prime Minister Narendra Modi, where it was previously revealed that they discussed the ‘rich potential’ of AI.
Huang said that he spoke to the Prime Minister on three aspects: acceleration of building AI infra in India, the need to upskill and primarily reskill every single engineer to be an AI engineer in the future (including NVIDIA’s own talent pool), and thirdly that NVIDIA would like to partner with companies in India — where it also reskills the IT workforce in India to make it the largest AI workforce in the world.
“I would like to accelerate the building of AI infrastructure here in India. You have your own data, lots and lots of data. You also have very diverse languages. Your diverse languages and population have diverse needs, different from the rest of the world. You have a local market, you have all of your own data. You have the great talent of computer scientists. You produce more computer scientists than any country on the planet. Your infrastructure for producing computer scientists is actual intelligence. You produce world-class computer scientists at scale,” Huang said.
Now, the idea is to create a new type of infrastructure that transforms data into intelligence, and Huang stresses there is no need for India to outsource that task.
“We should build it here. Train it here. Produce AI here. You have everything you need. Everything you need to build the AI and use the AI here in India, but you need to have infrastructure. This is now the production of intelligence,” he said.
The NVIDIA head honcho later made a prediction that one of India's largest export products is likely to be the AI it produces. “You will export more AI expertise than any country in the world. It potentially could be your largest export,” Huang said.
He stressed on artificial intelligence closing the technology divide.
“India has invested with so much vision in building the 5G infrastructure, and because everyone has access to a phone, on the other side of the phone is going to be an AI in the future. Whatever that villager would like to do, or a farmer would like to do what anybody would like to do. You just ask your phone, and your phone will perform the task for you. We have closed the technology divided. And he [PM Modi] is so happy to hear that.
Across India, NVIDIA has four development centres — Gurugram, Hyderabad, Pune and Bengaluru — and has more than 3,800 employees in the country. Of this, a little over 2,200 are based in India’s Silicon Valley. In fact, Huang said the company will be looking to double or triple its headcount here but did not offer any timeline.
Huang also backed the idea of India having AI sovereignty, because the country itself has 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.”
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