Government Invites Bids for AI Infrastructure Providers Under ₹10,372 Crore India AI Mission

The government has announced a call for bids to empanel artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure providers under the ₹10,372-crore India AI Mission, which received cabinet approval in March. The mission aims to develop a robust AI ecosystem by providing access to high-speed computing infrastructure, including graphics processing units (GPUs), accelerators, and Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), to various stakeholders such as academia, startups, researchers, and government bodies.

Empaneled entities, including data centers and cloud service providers, will offer these AI services at competitive rates determined through the bidding process. The mission, managed by IndiaAI under the Digital India Corporation, will feature over 10,000 GPUs to support the development of AI technologies.

Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary at the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), emphasized that the IndiaAI Mission aims to address the high cost of GPU-based cloud services in India, which are currently double the rates in countries with extensive GPU installations.

The bid document, issued by MeitY, specifies that the selected agencies will provide high-performance computing, network, and storage services necessary for the mission's initiatives, including the development of large language models (LLMs) and other AI applications.

The process will involve a transparent bidding procedure to ensure that AI services are provided at the lowest possible rates. Empaneled providers will be engaged for a 36-month period, with the potential for extension based on mutual agreements. The IndiaAI Mission will subsidize the AI service costs for approved projects.

Interested bidders must be capable of offering 1,000 AI compute units within six months of signing the agreement, with each unit required to have a processing speed of at least 15 teraflops (TFLOPS). Nvidia, a leading GPU manufacturer, is expected to play a significant role in this initiative.

The deadline for bid submissions is September 6.

ET