News Brief
NVIDIA chief holding up the new Blackwell GPU alongside its predecessor, Hopper.
A few months back Indian Government announced the procurement of 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) within the next 18 months. This strategic investment decision came as the Indian Government aims to boost its processing power and to align its resources with data generation capabilities.
As of now, India generates 20 per cent of the world’s data and holds the position of having the second highest number of GitHub AI projects globally, accounting for 19 per cent of worldwide AI projects.
And, in addition to these stats, multiple reports predict that India will add 850 Megawatts (MW) of data center capacity between 2024 and 2026, the highest increase in the Asia- Pacific Region (Excluding China).
India has turned digital at a mass level in the past decade. Due to explosive growth in digital payments, the data revolution in telecom after Reliance Jio brought down tariffs, government schemes that promote digital technologies, deeper penetration of the internet, the launch of 5G services, growth of e-commerce, etc, the requirement is of powerful digital hardware infrastructure, the GPUs, to maintain the momentum of growth.
As India is getting more and more digital, it needs more computing infrastructure, and for that, it needs cutting-edge computing hardware, the GPUs. More importantly, India needs GPUs to spur innovation in emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Amidst this significance of Data Centres and GPUs, India's private Industry players are also getting into contracts for setting up data centers.
For example, On 25 October 2024, Reliance and chipmaker Nvidia announced a joint attempt to build artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in India by setting up a 1GW (gigawatt) data center in Jamnagar, Gujarat.
In addition, The Indian government had announced a Rs 10,370 crore AI Mission to procure computing capacity in the country and offer it at concessional rates to start-ups and researchers.
The Modi Government, which is known for its focus on building roads, highways, railways, and airports, the infrastructure that speeds up economic growth is now marking a required and necessary focus on Digital Infrastructure, infra that boosts research and innovation in AI, machine learning and Data processing, etc. And In this entire picture, the role of Private players will be as crucial as that of the Government.