India’s US$1.25 billion push to power AI

India is ramping up its artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem with a US$1.25 billion (Rs 10,372 crore) investment to expand its computing infrastructure and develop an accessible data repository.

Through public-private partnerships, IndiaAI Mission plans to set up a computing capacity or ‘compute’ of 10,000 or more Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Over the next five years, it will build a platform stacked with non-personal data, such as environmental data, for Indian startups and researchers.

The money will also be used for the development and roll-out of Indian-built models, and to fund deep-tech AI startups. Guidelines and governance frameworks for ethical and responsible technology will also be put in place, and some data and AI Labs will be built outside the major cities.

India's AI market, growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 25-35% is expected to touch $US17 billion by 2027, fuelled by a growing AI workforce and an increase in generative AI investments.

Sanghamitra Bandyopadhyay, Director at Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, says the initiative will generate the necessary national computational resources to meet the demands of scalable AI research which individual institutions can’t afford.

“The United States and China have stronger compute powers. This is a beginning for India; we will have to build on this,” she said. Compute capacity will come up in private data centres and in data centres run by public firm CDAC.

Bandyopadhyay hopes the data platform will plug the gap in access to good data. “Ongoing AI research is in niche institutions, in silos. A large proportion of researchers and university students, largely, are not getting access to this data. They get access to data from the US and Europe, but Indian data has been hard to come by,” she noted.

Eventually, the availability of anonymised personal datasets, such as for AI-based genomics and proteomics research, will be crucial to driving AI-led innovation. “There should be regulations, but not too much of them,” she said.

The AI Mission’s focus on deep-tech startups — around 3,000 of them are in operation, making up 12% of the country’s startup ecosystem — is in line with the country’s deep-tech policy to be launched this year.

Aridni Shah, co-founder of immunitoAI, an AI-startup making novel antibodies, says the allocation is “a great starting point since there is a trend in the venture capitalist ecosystem to double down on sectors the government is focusing on.”

“This initiative will lead to more investments flowing into the deep-tech sector and de-risk some of the early stages of the tech development, leading to product innovation,” Shah says.

Indervir Singh Banipal, a software engineer at IBM, recommends a thorough environmental impact assessment of the mission considering energy consumption, carbon emissions, water usage, and waste generation associated with AI operations. Data centres hosting large-scale computing infrastructures, for example, have massive water and energy footprints.

“By identifying potential environmental risks and impacts early in the planning process, the AI Mission can implement mitigation measures to minimize its ecological footprint and promote sustainable practices,” he says.