India’s AI Mission Nears Milestone: Secure, Affordable Indigenous Model Expected In Six Months

India is all set to launch its own safe and secure indigenous AI model at an affordable cost, said Electronics and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced on Thursday (30 January).

Speaking to media, Vaishnaw said that the Indian AI model is a timely step as India is a trusted nation among the comity of nations and therefore it will help India emerge as a more reliable technological powerhouse of ethical AI solutions in the days to come. 

Backed by a high-end common computing facility, the India AI mission is now closer to customising indigenous AI solutions for the Indian context using Indian languages.

Noting that scientists, researchers, developers and coders are working on multiple foundational models in this regard, the Union Minister expressed hope that with the given pace, the Indian AI model is likely to be ready within six months.

The AI model is beginning with the computation facility of roughly 10,000 GPUs. Soon the remaining 8,693 GPUs will be added.

It will largely benefit researchers, students and developers in the beginning.

Compared to global models computation costing $2.5 to $3 per hour usage, India’s AI Model computation will cost less than less than 100 rupees per hour after 40 per cent government subsidy.

The attractive half yearly and annual plans will further make it more affordable.

According to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, within 10 months of the launch of India AI Mission, the ministry has been able to create a high end and robust common computing facility of about 18,693 Graphic Processing Unit, GPUs.

It is about nine times of what Chinese Open Source AI Model DeepSeek has and about two third of what ChatGPT has, according to a ministry release.

Responding to media queries, Vaishnaw said that DeepSeek can get hosted on Indian servers after security checks so that coders, developers and designers can take benefit of its Open Source code.

DeepSeek’s AI assistant, reportedly developed in just two months at a cost of under $6 million, has challenged industry beliefs about the cost barrier in AI development.

It leveraged Nvidia’s less-advanced H800 chips, yet still delivered remarkable performance.

DeepSeek’s success has disrupted assumptions that China lags behind US firms like OpenAI.

The startup’s AI tools have surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT in downloads on Apple’s App Store, signalling growing global competition.

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