Nvidia explores AI partnerships with Indian government for building sovereign AI using DPIs

Nvidia has seen its shares more than double in the last year, putting it near a $2 trillion valuation. (Source: Bloomberg)

India's digital public infrastructure (DPI) can be used for building sovereign artificial intelligence (AI), Nvidia's senior vice president for enterprise sales and business development Shankar Trivedi said after a recent meeting with Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

During the meeting Trivedi and Chandrasekhar discussed potential areas of partnership in the field of sovereign AI.

After the meeting with Chandrasekhar on February 26, Trivedi said, "What's happening today in India is extremely exciting. New infrastructure is being built. A huge startup ecosystem is well underway and the DPI has now reached critical mass. Many new applications can be built on DPIs."

"From Nvidia's perspective, what is really interesting is the growth  and pervasiveness of sovereign AI. The DPI can be used as a basis for building sovereign AI, together with very strong infrastructure, to run these generative AI models, which can be built on DPI," he said.

"I find this very exciting. And it is a huge opportunity for Nvidia to partner with the government and all of the startup, large corporate ecosystem," he added. However, the official Digital India account on X, formerly Twitter, described the discussion between the two on "potential areas of partnerships".

The development follows Nvidia's January announcement of partnering with India Inc to set up AI data centre facilities.

Earlier in February, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said that every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence. Huang described sovereign AI as a country’s ownership over its data and the intelligence it produces.

In September 2023, NVIDIA and Reliance Industries announced a collaboration to develop India’s own foundation large language model trained on the nation’s diverse languages and tailored for generative AI applications to serve the nation.