IndiaAI Mission: Govt prepares to launch GPU access portal as China’s DeepSeek escalates AI race

The IndiaAI Mission was launched in March 2024 with the aim of boosting India's AI capabilities, both in the infrastructure and the services side.

The announcement of the successful bidder for procuring graphics processing units (GPUs) under the IndiaAI Mission is expected this week, and the government is currently putting the finishing touches on the portal from which startups and researchers can access these GPUs, a government official said.

"The government has been working on making the portal, and we are nearly done developing it," said a senior government official. Through this portal, startups and researchers can access the highly valued GPUs necessary for training AI models at lower prices.

Sources said that the bidding took place on January 22, and the results are expected to be announced by the end of the ongoing week at the latest.

Ten firms including Jio Platforms, Tata Communications, E2E Networks Limited, Yotta Data Services Limited took part in the bidding process to procure 10,000 GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission.

As much as 44 percent, or Rs 4,563.36 crore, of the Rs 10,371.92 crore of the IndiaAI Mission has been earmarked for providing compute capacity of more than 10,000 GPUs over five years.

This development comes at a time when Chinese startup DeepSeek with their open-source reasoning model R1 has challenged the narrative that entities need access to large amounts of GPU for building frontier models.

"IndiaAI's compute pillar is very open and flexible. Ultimately, the idea is that institutions and researchers use GPUs and bring in innovations," the official said indicating that DeepSeek's breakthrough in terms of efficiency will not have any detrimental impact on the government's AI infrastructure plans.

The official also noted that DeepSeek model was open-source and said that startups and researchers were free to leverage the model for building their innovations.

MeitY’s current approach of procuring GPUs in bulk avoids traditional viability gap funding, which could have excluded existing GPU capacity providers.

Instead, it allowed both established players and new entrants to participate in bids, ensuring maximum utilisation of available infrastructure.

The ministry remains open to subsidising GPU usage for specific needs like research and innovation to support accessibility further.