Abu Dhabi’s G42 is planning to build large data centers in India focussed on AI workloads and one of the country's largest supercomputers. It also plans to launch its Hindi Large Language Model, called NANDA, and is engaged with startups and enterprises across segments for its adoption in the country, Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India, told Moneycontrol in an interview.
G42 is known for creating Condor Galaxy, the world’s largest supercomputer for AI training, and Jais, the world’s first open-source Arabic LLM.
Jain, who previously led Xiaomi’s India operations, said G42, through its subsidiary company, Inception, invested “millions of dollars” to develop this Indic LLM. He said the LLM will launch commercially in India in 4-5 months. “We are talking to multiple technology companies and startups where we can collaborate with them to improve this model and develop industry-specific applications on top of it.”
NANDA, which is a 13-billion-parameter model trained on approximately 2.13 trillion tokens of language datasets, including Hindi, was trained on Condor Galaxy, one of the world’s most powerful AI supercomputers for training and inferencing, built by G42 and Cerebras. Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence - the world’s first graduate research university dedicated to AI - and Cerebras Systems also collaborated with G42 to build the model.
Jain said G42 is also interested in working with companies to build specific banking, insurance, and space tech applications. “There could be different opportunities around data and building the next iteration of the model itself.”
In August 2023, the company launched JAIS. “We are not at a 70-billion-parameter model with Jais, now the largest Arabic LLM. We will not stop with this, but are continuing to develop the model using the breakthrough in Arabic,” said Andrew Jackson, acting CEO of Inception, a G42 company.
Jackson said that G42 and Inception are firm believers in sovereignty regarding these LLMs and are willing to share their expertise.
Taking a dig at OpenAI, Jackson said ChatGPT user data and other services have been sent to the US for processing. “If you don’t want to pursue your technological path, you become a digital colony because all the control of these models lies with the US. People who want these models want sovereignty and be able to protect their data and consumers… This is the start of a relationship between India and the UAE.”
Jain said G42 is considering India's sovereign needs while proceeding with its future collaboration with Indian companies to build applications using this Indic LLM. “We have built a small team to help take this model to various entities.”
Jain said the existing team would also work on G42’s other initiatives, including the one about setting up large AI data centers and supercomputers. “We plan to build a bigger team, especially given that most of our data scientists in most of our group companies, including Inception, are from India. Building a bigger team in India to develop core technology will be natural synergy.”
G42 plans to build up to 2 gigawatt AI-ready data centres in India - double the total existing capacity - as part of a pact signed between the UAE and Indian governments aimed at co-developing sovereign AI. It will invest in the project which was part of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between the two governments back in February 2024,
On G42’s data center plans, Jain said building physical infrastructure like data centere and supercomputers will take a few years in India. Still, the company is open to acquiring data center companies or data center assets in the country if presented with the right opportunity.
“We are currently working on the timeline to build these data centere since they have too many elements, including land acquisition, power management, and connectivity with undersea landing cables,” Jain said.
The company plans to build a supercomputer with eight exaFLOPS capacity in India.
The company could also be interested in India’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) mission, which is working on building a comprehensive ecosystem to foster AI innovation in the country. Jain said an MoU exists between India and the UAE to create the digital infrastructure assigned to G42.
“The two countries have signed an MoU, and as part of this MoU, we are trying to understand the different offerings of the AI mission. If tomorrow there is an opportunity to participate in the mission, then why not? What India aims to achieve with the mission and what we do are similar,” Jain said. He, however, clarified that there is no formal discussion around the AI mission.
Since its founding in 2018, G42 has partnerships with major firms such as OpenAI, Dell, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle and Cerebras.
G42 has received investments from global technology investors Mubadala and Silver Lake. In April 2024, Microsoft invested $1.5 billion in G42, and Microsoft's Vice Chair and President Brad Smith joined the G42 Board.
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