India could get access to Nvidia’s latest generation of artificial intelligence (AI) chips, called B200, as early as January-March of next year, according to Yotta chief executive officer Sunil Gupta.
Speaking at Moneycontrol and CNBC TV18’s AI Alliance in Pune on March 27, the data centre company’s chief said that the B200 chips will be first available to Nvidia’s big customers starting October this year.
The B200 "Blackwell" AI chip is 30 times faster than its predecessor, the Hopper series, at tasks including helping chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini deliver answers.
The chip can run large language models while using 25 times less energy and money than the highly popular Hopper series that helped turn Nvidia into a $2 trillion company.
“We have placed an order of 16,000 H100 GPUs from NVIDIA which together would be like the 9th or 10th largest supercomputer globally... India will also have access to the latest generation of B200 AI chips from Nvidia by Jan-March next year,” Gupta said.
“If we have to make Indian AI projects highly scalable, we need the infrastructure in India. This should be sovereign and affordable for small startups,” he added.
During a panel session alongside Bhashini CEO Amitabh Nag, Gupta said that Yotta’s AI data centre would go live on May 15.
Moneycontrol reported earlier that a billion-dollar public-private partnership model to set up graphics processing unit (GPU) capacity in the country is likely to be structured in a way that the government doesn't have to pay data centre companies for any capital expenditure.
This is unlike the $10 billion incentive scheme for semiconductors, where the government is paying chip companies to set up plants in the country.
The industry has advised the government that it should not invest directly in the capex for GPUs. However, it should subscribe to the GPU capacity put up by domestic data centre companies and allocate it to startups, Gupta told Moneycontrol recently.
Apart from other hindrances in building home-grown foundational models, India lacks domestic compute capacity. To solve that issue, one of the aims of the IndiaAI mission is to make over 10,000 GPUs available in India. IndiaAI is the government's AI ecosystem building initiative.
GPUs, which are primarily designed to render images and videos quickly and efficiently, are the hardware on top of which AI models can be trained. They are primarily housed in a data centre.
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