Government gets bids offering 18,000 GPUs in Round-2 of IndiaAI Mission tender
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The Centre has received bids proposing to offer 18,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) in the second round of the IndiaAI GPU tender , and expects 15,000 GPUs to finally be offered following technical qualifications and commercial bid-opening, IndiaAI CEO Abhishek Singh said.The first round of the GPU tender has already concluded. In that round, New Delhi is offering 15,000 GPUs on subsidised rates to the country's startups, academics and research organisations.Sunil Gupta, cofounder and chief executive, Yotta Data Services, told ET that while the company had already offered 8,192 Nvidia H100 GPUs and 1,024 Nvidia L40S GPUs in first round of empanelment, it has now proposed Nvidia Blackwell B200s in this second round of empanelment. IndiaAI Mission has shortlisted seven companies—including partners of Amazon Web Service (AWS), Oracle and Google Cloud—for technical evaluation under the second round of the GPU tender, ET had reported on May 7.The Mission has invited the firms—Netmagic IT Services (now known as NTT Global Data Centers & Cloud Infrastructure India, or NTT GDC India), Cyfuture India, Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Yotta Data Services, and Ishan Infotech—for technical presentation of their proposals on May 14.There are already more than 230 applications to India AI for building India-specific large language models (LLMs) / small language models (SLMs) and more than 30,000 GPU requests are in the pipeline."The bid submission is now open for third continuous empanelment," Singh said, indicating that the third round of the GPU tender is now open for accepting bids.Some companies are planning to bid higher versions of GPUs in the third round.Piyush Somani, founding chief executive of Cloud company ESDS Software Solution told ET, "We are in the process of acquiring the Nvidia Blackwell series of GPUs -- B200 and B300. Once those are deployed in our data centres, we will be submitting the bid for the third round of the IndiaAI Mission's GPU tender which is now open.""We won't be participating with the older generation GPUs," Somani who is also president, Cloud Computing Innovation Council of India, added.Mumbai-headquartered Cloudstrats Technologies who had participated in the pre-bid meeting were interested in bidding for the second round of the tender and had requested IndiaAI for an extension.The tender inviting authority did not grant the extension. Cloudstrats is however going to participate in future empanelments, it said.The company told ET, 'With established partnerships with hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure, we are well-positioned and experienced to deliver scalable AI infrastructure covering high-performance compute, secure storage, and cloud-native services."India had formally launched its Rs 10,000-crore India AI Mission in January, under which against the target of 10,000 GPUs outlined in the IndiaAI compute pillar, empanelled bidders have offered 14,517 GPUs at L1 rates.As part of the Mission, the government is also incentivising the development of local language models built by academia and industry with investment capital and other support. The move is aimed at building up India's AI prowess.
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After all, when Microsoft withdrew its services, Nayara turned to a domestic company for digital services. Digital sovereignty thus requires a parallel 'digital industrialisation' policy, with robust efforts for the rapid development of a domestic digital industry. Digital is now a fully mature space, and an essential and all-pervading part of national life. There can be no sovereignty without digital sovereignty. Additionally, in democracies, digital sovereignty has to be understood as the sovereignty of the people in control of their digital future, and not as the State in control of digital systems. The time for waiting, meandering and reactive responses, is over. A digital sovereignty policy would determine all other stances on digital issues, including in trade agreements, that India is rapidly entering into. It would fortify the country and position it as a formidable player in the 21st century global economy. This article is authored by Smita Purushottam, former ambassador to Switzerland and Parminder Jeet Singh, digital society researcher, New Delhi.
