NEW DELHI, Jan 31 (Reuters) – India is racing to catch up in artificial intelligence (AI) as the government engages researchers, start-ups, and companies to create foundational models within the next 10 months, amidst the global stir caused by Chinese start-up DeepSeek.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration has selected 18 proposals that will be supported with computing infrastructure, data, and capital to build AI-related applications in sectors such as agriculture and climate change, Information Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced on Jan 30.
“The foundational models made in India will be able to compete with the best of the best in the world,” Vaishnaw said, adding that six major developers will be able to build foundational AI models by year-end. India is seeking to build computing capacity of just over 18,000 graphics processing units, with home-grown E2E Networks and Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms among the companies vying to build this capacity using processing units such as Nvidia’s H100.
“The average per AI compute unit is 111.85 rupees (S$1.75) per hour,” Vaishnaw told reporters in New Delhi.
India, which expects companies to invest US$30 billion (S$40.6 billion) to build data centres over the next few years, will fund 40% of the computing price of the proposals, the minister said.
The initiative comes in the same week as China’s DeepSeek AI start-up wowed the world with its advances in competing with US industry leaders like OpenAI. Foundation models, a type of AI paradigm trained on vast datasets to perform a wide range of tasks, are designed to adapt and can be further fine-tuned for specific applications, making them versatile.
The federal government aims to get developers to build large as well as small language models as part of its ambitious $1.2 billion IndiaAI mission.
The market for open-source AI models is dominated by US tech giants Alphabet and Meta Platforms, with DeepSeek emerging as a new challenger. India will soon host DeepSeek on local servers, Vaishnaw said.
OpenAI, which operates ChatGPT, will support the development of applications at the IndiaAI Mission, the company has previously stated.