Government invites bids to empanel AI infra providers under ₹10,372 crore India AI mission

India invites bids for AI services on cloud under India AI Mission, offering high-speed computing infrastructure to stakeholders.

The government has invited bids for the empanelment of entities for providing Artificial Intelligence (AI) services on cloud under the ₹10,372-crore India AI mission, which was approved by the Cabinet in March this year.

The empanelled agencies, such as data centres and cloud service providers, will have to provide access to high-speed computing AI infrastructure such as graphics processing unit (GPUs), accelerators, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), storage etc to academia, startups, researchers, government bodies among others at the lowest rate that will be discovered through the bidding process.

Under the India AI Mission, supercomputing capacity, comprising more than 10,000 GPUs, will be made available to various stakeholders for creating an AI ecosystem.

"With an objective to empanel service providers for making this possible, IndiaAI — an IBD under Digital India Corporation, MeitY [Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology] has issued a RFE (request for empanelment)," Meity, Additional Secretary Abhishek Singh said in a social media post.

The rapid development of AI across the globe has led to an increase in demand for GPU-based servers, as they can process data at a higher speed compared to CPU-based servers.

The rate of accessing GPU-based cloud services in India is estimated to be at double the price compared to the price of countries that have installed a large number of GPUs.

According to the bid document floated by the Meity empanelled agencies will be responsible for offering high-performance computing, network, and storage services that are essential for implementing the activities planned under the IndiaAI Mission, such as the development of indigenous LLMs (large language models like ChatGPT) and AI applications.