Third tender set to add 3,800 GPUs to IndiaAI GPU cluster

Time of India

18 hours ago

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Around 3,850 GPUs will be added via the third round of the IndiaAI Mission graphics processing units (GPU) tender, IndiaAI Mission chief executive Abhishek Singh told ET. In a first, IndiaAI has got 1,050 Google Trillium TPUs Search engine giant Google's sixth-generation Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), called Trillium, is available for Google Cloud customers.Singh told ET, 'No new bidders have been empanelled in this round. Additional GPUs provided by already empanelled bidders include 1,300 Nvidia H100 GPUs by Locuz, 50 Google Trillium TPUs by Ishan Infotech, and 2500 GPUs by Sify (1000 Google Trillium TPUs, 800 Nvidia H200 GPUs and 700 Nvidia L4 GPUs). Vensysco has lowered prices but not provided any additional GPUs.'IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, on May 30, had announced the addition of 15,916 GPUs to the existing cluster of 18,417 GPUs creating a total of 34,333 GPUs. Now these 3,850 GPUs will be added to the existing cluster of 34,333 GPUs.Four out of six applicant companies cleared the technical round. They were Ishan Infotech, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Sify Digital Services, and Vensysco Technologies. Locuz and Vensysco are Amazon Web Services (AWS) partners.Rackbank Datacenters, and Teleglobal International did not clear the technical round.The financial bid evaluation of the third round is complete and there have been minor changes in the L1 (lowest bidder) prices, Singh said. Now the empanelled bidders of the first and second round of the GPU tender will be asked to match these prices. On June 4, ET had reported that the decline in the price of the same GPU model from the first round to the second round ranged from a mere Rs 4 an hour to as high as Rs 1234 per hour.India gave the cabinet approval for the Rs 10,000-crore IndiaAI Mission in March last year, with a target of procuring over 10,000 GPUs. That number has far been exceeded and the IndiaAI Mission is offering GPUs at one of the lowest prices in the world -- coming up to be less than a dollar per hour.As part of the IndiaAI mission, the government is incentivising the development of large language models (LLMs) built by startups like Sarvam, Gnani, Gan, and Soket AI Labs with investment capital and other support. The move is aimed at building up India's AI prowess.Out of 506 proposals received by the IndiaAI Mission for building foundation AI models, 43 are specifically dedicated to building LLMs.Ishan, Locuz, Sify, and Vensysco, did not respond to ET's requests for comment. As per sources, in the second round, Ishan is offering 300 Nvidia L4 GPUs, 304 Nvidia H100 GPUs, and 400 Nvidia H200 GPUs.In the first and second round, Locuz is offering 2100 Nvidia H200 GPUs, 700 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 100 AWS Trainium GPUs, and 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs, as per sources.In the second round, Sify is offering 1,000 Nvidia L4 GPUs, as per sources. ET had reported on May 7 that Vensysco's consortium partner will be Appsquadz Software, along with AWS. In the second round, it will be offering 2,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 100 AWS Trainium 1 GPUs, and 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs. It offered 1,000 GPUs in the first round.In a statement to ET on July 4, Vensysco had said its total current offering includes 2,400 GPUs. 'Vensysco even has access to 4000 more H100 GPUs but are awaiting fulfilment of order for the first 2000 offered to India AI post which Vensysco will offer more GPUs,' the company had said.