Rising Bharat Summit: India will need 200,000 GPUs to stay competitive in AI, says Ashwini Vaishnaw

India will need to scale its artificial intelligence computing capacity to nearly 200,000 GPUs or more in the coming years to meet the rising demand for foundational models and enterprise AI applications, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Friday 27.

Speaking at the News18 Rising Bharat Summit, Vaishnaw said the government had already exceeded its initial targets under the IndiaAI Mission but must now move to a much higher level of investment.

“When we started the AI mission, the target was 10,000 GPUs. We have already achieved 38,000 and another 20,000 are being added. But I think we will have to go somewhere near 200,000 or even more than that,” he said.

Vaishnaw said the surge in demand was being driven by foundational AI models and interest from startups and enterprises in training and deploying AI systems in India.

In this context, he also talked about the Union Budget announcement granting tax breaks for data centres until 2047, which he said would help attract global data and processing workloads to India.

According to Vaishnaw, several companies that did not announce investments during the India AI Impact Summit are planning large-scale infrastructure facilities in the coming months.

“They would like to set up significantly large infra facilities throughout the country so that the talent pool can get access to compute,” he said.

The government is now preparing the next phase of the IndiaAI Mission, which is expected to significantly expand public and private sector participation in AI compute, research and deployment.