As part of the vision of ‘Making AI in India’ and ‘Making AI Work for India,’ the Union Cabinet has approved the comprehensive national-level India Artificial Intelligence mission with a budget outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore.
Briefing media after a meeting of the union cabinet, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said that IndiaAI mission will establish a comprehensive ecosystem catalyzing AI innovation through strategic programmes and partnerships across the public and private sectors.
“In order to develop the ecosystem of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a framework of India’s AI mission has been prepared in a comprehensive manner. In December 2023, at the Global Partnership on AI summit which concluded in the national capital, the vision of India AI was put forth by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, under which, several aspects including the adoption of AI on a bigger scale, providing innovators with wider opportunities, and skill development in this field, have been included,” Goyal said.
“Over 10,000 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) will be procured in the public-private partnership to aid a computing system for a high-end AI ecosystem, which will also be conducive to the design of an AI marketplace,” he added.
An official release said that by democratizing computing access, improving data quality, developing indigenous AI capabilities, attracting top AI talent, enabling industry collaboration, providing startup risk capital, ensuring socially impactful AI projects and bolstering ethical AI, the mission will drive responsible, inclusive growth of India’s AI ecosystem.
The cabinet meeting was chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The release said that the mission will be implemented by ‘IndiaAI’ Independent Business Division (IBD) under Digital India Corporation (DIC) and has various components like IndiaAI Compute Capacity, IndiaAI Innovation Centre, IndiaAI Datasets Platform, IndiaAI Application Development Initiative, IndiaAI FutureSkills, IndiaAI Startup Financing and Safe & Trusted AI.
The release said IndiaAI Compute Capacity, the compute pillar, will build a high-end scalable AI computing ecosystem to cater to the increasing demands from India’s rapidly expanding AI start-ups and research ecosystem.
“The ecosystem will comprise AI compute infrastructure of 10,000 or more Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), built through public-private partnership. Further, an AI marketplace will be designed to offer AI as a service and pre-trained models to AI innovators. It will act as a one-stop solution for resources critical for AI innovation,” the release said.
IndiaAI Innovation Centre will undertake the development and deployment of indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models in critical sectors.
The IndiaAI Datasets Platform will streamline access to quality non-personal datasets for AI Innovation. A unified data platform will be developed to provide a one-stop solution for seamless access to non-personal datasets to Indian Startups and researchers.