The government has called for bids to empanel organisations that will provide artificial intelligence (AI) services on the cloud as part of the Rs 103.72 billion India AI mission.
The empanelled agencies, including data centres and cloud service providers, will be required to offer access to high-speed AI computing infrastructure, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), accelerators, tensor processing units (TPUs), and storage, to various stakeholders like academia, startups, researchers, and government bodies at the most competitive rates determined through the bidding process. As part of the India AI Mission, supercomputing capacity exceeding 10,000 GPUs will be made available to foster an AI ecosystem.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) empanelled agencies will be tasked with providing high-performance computing, networking, and storage services essential for executing activities outlined in the India AI mission, including the development of indigenous large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and various AI applications.
Eligible agencies must offer 1,000 AI compute units via their cloud service platforms within six months of signing the agreement with India AI. Each compute unit is required to have a processing speed of at least 15 TFLOPS (teraflops), which translates to the capability of performing 15 trillion floating-point calculations per second. This performance level is primarily achieved through the use of GPUs or Google’s TPUs.
Further, MeitY has fixed September 6, 2024, as the last date for submission of bids.
