On Friday, the American chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA.O) announced AI partnerships with the Indian conglomerates Tata Group and Reliance Industries to create cloud infrastructure, language models, and generative applications.
The agreements with two of India’s biggest corporate houses would help the American chip company make deeper inroads into the South Asian country’s developing AI ecosystem, even if it now faces obstacles in some of its chip shipments to China and other nations because of American regulations.
Before the G20 summit in New Delhi, where attendees include U.S. President Joe Biden, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi this week to discuss India’s potential in the AI field.
In the Reliance agreement, Jio, a subsidiary of Reliance (RELI.NS), will manage and maintain the infrastructure and be in charge of consumer engagement, while Nvidia will supply the computing capacity needed to construct a cloud AI infrastructure platform.
In addition to offering energy-efficient AI infrastructure to researchers, developers, and startups across India, Reliance will build AI apps and services for their 450 million Jio (telecom) subscribers.
The Nvidia alliance will be used by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS.NS), India’s top exporter of software services, to create and process generative AI applications and a supercomputer, the firms announced in a joint statement. By utilizing the relationship, TCS will also upskill its 600,000-strong staff.
According to the announcement, the agreement would also accelerate the AI-led transformation across all Tata Group enterprises, from manufacturing to consumer sectors.
Globally, ChatGPT, the popular generative AI chatbot from OpenAI, is powered by computing devices that are almost exclusively manufactured by Nvidia. Because it reads a written prompt and creates a human-like answer from it, the AI that powers these applications is referred to as a big language model.
The richest man in Asia and chairman of Reliance, Mukesh Ambani, has already emphasized the importance of having “digital infrastructure in India that can handle AI’s immense computational demands.”
Through the arrangement, Reliance will have access to the most recent iteration of Nvidia’s AI chips, the Grace Hopper Superchip, which are designed to conduct AI inference tasks and efficiently power apps like ChatGPT.
Reliance claimed that several of India’s major AI initiatives, including chatbots, medication discovery, and climate research, will advance thanks to the new AI infrastructure.
Partner at Counterpoint Research Neil Shah said Jio needs to implement AI to “make sense” of the data it has collected from millions of consumers and develop into a digital firm offering services outside of telecom.
In the retail, telecom, and financial sectors, he said, “the AI infrastructure will enable it to provide accurate recommendations and cross-sell products and services across its enormous client network.”
