The Indian government will float a request for proposal (RFP) for artificial intelligence (AI) chips as soon as the ongoing Lok Sabha election's model code of conduct ends, a senior official said on May 17.
"We will float the RFP for setting up of a super compute infra as soon as the model code of conduct ends. It won't just be NVIDIA chips, but everything that is needed," Abhishek Singh, additional secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said at Moneycontrol and CNBC TV18 AI Alliance NCR Chapter in Gurugram.
"It will take some time... between 12-18 months after that to become operational," he added.
The government aims to make AI graphics processing units (GPUs) available within the next 18-24 months under the Rs 10,372 crore AI Mission.
Singh also said that all startups or researchers using Indian datasets to address social impact problem statements identified by the government would have access to India AI's compute infrastructure.
"We have to think of AI as we thought of atomic energy or space research. That time also we were catching up with the West. It was a moonshot. But we were able to attract the best minds and they built something we are proud of," he said.
"Somebody told me there are only 300 people in the world who can train a foundation model from scratch and 8 to 10 of them are Indians. Of course, if we can attract them here, it would be a Bhabha moment", he added.
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