August 17th 2024.
The government of India has recently announced a new mission, the India AI mission, with a budget of Rs 10,372 crore. This mission aims to promote the use of artificial intelligence by providing access to high-speed computing infrastructure to various stakeholders such as academia, startups, and government bodies. In order to make this possible, the government has invited bids from entities to empanel as service providers for offering AI services on cloud.
The empaneled agencies, which include data centers and cloud service providers, will have to provide access to high-speed computing AI infrastructure like graphics processing units, accelerators, Tensor Processing Units, and storage at the lowest possible rates. This will be determined through a bidding process. The IndiaAI mission plans to make supercomputing capacity, with over 10,000 GPUs, available for creating an AI ecosystem.
Abhishek Singh, the Additional Secretary of the Ministry of Electronics and IT, announced in a social media post that the IndiaAI mission has issued a Request for Empanelment (RFE) to invite service providers to be a part of this mission. This is an initiative under the Digital India Corporation and MeitY.
The demand for GPU-based servers has increased globally due to the rapid development of AI. They are known for their ability to process data at a higher speed compared to CPU-based servers. However, in India, the cost of accessing these services is estimated to be double the price of other countries with a large number of GPUs installed.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT has released a bid document stating that the empaneled agencies will be responsible for providing high-performance computing, network, and storage services to support the activities planned under the IndiaAI mission. This includes developing indigenous LLMs and AI applications. The end users who will have access to these cloud-based AI services will be approved by IndiaAI to ensure fair and transparent pricing. The empaneled AI service providers will be engaged for a period of 36 months, with a possibility of extension based on mutual agreement.
It is important to note that the "Invitation for Application" is not a procurement agreement, but rather an invitation to receive proposals from eligible and interested bidders. The document also mentions that IndiaAI will make payments for the utilized AI services of the approved projects from the end users to the extent of the approved subsidy.
In order to be eligible for bidding, agencies must make 1,000 AI compute units available through their cloud service platform within 6 months of signing the agreement with IndiaAI. Each compute unit should have a processing speed of at least 15 TFLOPS, which means the ability to perform 15 trillion floating-point calculations per second. This speed can currently be achieved by GPUs or Google's TPUs. It is estimated that Nvidia leads the GPU market with an 88% market share.
The last date for submission of bids is September 6, as announced by the Ministry of Electronics and IT. This is an exciting opportunity for service providers to be a part of the IndiaAI mission and contribute to the growth of AI in the country.
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