The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has invited applications from to procure 10,000 GPUs to provide access to artificial intelligence (AI) services over cloud to academia, MSMEs, startups, governments, and other public sector agencies, under the IndiaAI Mission.
In March 2024, the Government of Indian approved the Rs 10,732 crore IndiaAI Mission with the aim of creating computing infrastructure for the country, AI centres for multi-modal LLMs, procuring 10,000 graphics processing units, and more.
MeitY floated a tender on August 16, inviting applications for empanelment of agencies for providing AI services on cloud. The ministry said that IndiaAI would approve end users who will have access to these AI services on cloud.
To be clear, based on the contents of the RFE, there was confusion among the industry whether the tender was procuring 1,000 or 10,000 GPUs.
On August 29, during the pre-bid meeting, the government clarified that the tender was for procuring 10,000 GPUs and each bidder will have to commit to installing 1,000 GPUs minimum.
"The empanelled agencies will provide their services to these authorised end users at prices discovered through this process. The AI services on the cloud from the select agencies would be empanelled for 36 months and may be extended further based on mutually agreed terms," the tender read.
The ministry said that to be eligible for the application process, all AI services have to be delivered from data centres in India, and that the bidders' cloud platform would need to have a minimum of 1,000 AI compute units installed.
The RFP is also expected to clarify whether data centres/cloud service providers in other countries will be eligible to participate in the bidding process.
Also read: About Rs 5,000 crore earmarked for AI chips: MeitY’s Abhishek Singh
In June, MeitY kicked off the Rs 10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission by inviting nominations from 50 institutes, including IITs, NITs, etc, for students who are undertaking projects in artificial intelligence. Selected students who are pursuing BTech or MTech programmes at the top 50 National Institutional Ranking Framework-ranked engineering colleges will be offered fellowships to undertake projects in AI.
BTech students who are selected will be offered Rs 1 lakh across three tranches, said an official communique of the IT Ministry. MTech students will get Rs 2 lakh funding in four tranches of Rs 50,000 each, the communique added.
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