India may get own GPU in 3-5 years, says Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

India may be able to develop its own high-end computing chipset, known as GPUs, in the next 3-5 years, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said.

India may be able to develop its own high-end computing chipset, known as GPUs, in the next 3-5 years while a local foundational AI platform is expected in 10 months, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Tuesday.

During a Budget Roundtable 2025 organised by India Today & Business Today, Vaishnaw said that the government will make available 18,000 high-end GPU-based compute facilities for AI development to entities in the country in the next couple of days and expects India's own AI platform within 10 months.

"We are working on multiple, actually three options, where we take a chipset which is at some reasonable level available in open source or available as a licensed thing, and then build upon that to build our own GPU. That's the approach the entire world has followed and that approach will be able to give us India's own GPU in the time frame of three to five years," Vaishnaw said.

GPUs (graphics processing units) were earlier used for processing multimedia content where a lot of computing processes were required, like gaming, video processing etc.

However, the demand for GPUs has skyrocketed after massive demand for AI across the world. US chip company Nvidia dominates the market with over 80% market share. The minister said that several start-ups have developed very efficiently, though they are small compared to ChatGPT.

"We already embarked 18,000 GPUs, very high-end GPUs, and out of that, 10,000 are already available. So this 18,000 compute power will be rolled out in a couple of days. The tender process got completed last week, and in another couple of days, 3-4 days, this will be rolled out," Vaishnaw said.

He said that high-end computing infrastructure is the basic requirement to develop artificial intelligence models that can be bought by those who have deep pockets, but the government has put in place a mechanism wherein people can access computing infrastructure at low cost.