Here are six things that AI chip giant Nvidia proposes to do in India

Nvidia Corp has reached an agreement with billionaire Mukesh Ambani's conglomerate Reliance Industries to build out an artificial intelligence (AI) computing infrastructure as well an innovation centre in India, the AI chip giant's CEO Jensen Huang said on Thursday (October 24).

A new major data centre by Reliance Industries will use the latest Nvidia's Blackwell AI chips. Nvidia already has presence in six locations across India.

Nvidia is currently holding one of its AI summits in Mumbai, showcasing how Indian companies are using its AI technology to improve their products and services. India is seen as a key player in the AI market, with its population of 1.4 billion increasingly adopting AI across various sectors such as agriculture, education, and manufacturing.

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The Federal takes you through some of the key initiatives that Nvidia proposes to take up in India in the coming days.

Building AI infrastructure

The partnership between Reliance and Nvidia aims to build a robust AI infrastructure in the country, which Ambani believes will not only enhance local capabilities but also position India as a significant player in the global intelligence market.

"India will start with the absolutely best that Nvidia has," Ambani said.

Huang, during a press conference, told reporters in Mumbai that the partnership also includes creating applications that Reliance could offer to consumers in India.

"We will also have an innovation centre as part of the tie-up," he said. He did not quantify the size of the infrastructure to be built.

“India is already world class in designing chips, Nvidia's are designed here in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune. A third of Nvidia is Indian, may be more,” Huang said.

Adoption of AI with TCS

Apart from Reliance Industries, Nvidia has announced partnerships with various other Indian companies. Among them are Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Tech Mahindra and Infosys.

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TCS on Thursday revealed that it has launched a new NVIDIA business unit to accelerate industry-wide adoption of artificial intelligence by its customers. “TCS has expanded its collaboration with NVIDIA to launch industry-specific solutions and offerings that will help customers adopt artificial intelligence (AI) faster and at scale. These solutions and offerings will be delivered through TCS’ new business unit focused on NVIDIA, under its AI cloud business unit. TCS’ new business unit builds on a collaboration with NVIDIA for over five years, brings together the complementary capabilities of both organisations and offers tailored offerings for various industries,” Tata Consultancy Services said in a statement.

NVIDIA said the fusion of TCS’ deep expertise with NVIDIA’s AI technology will transformation to spawn a new era of ‘intelligent enterprise’.

AI model for Hindi

Nvidia has also launched a lightweight artificial intelligence model for the widely-used Hindi language, as it looks to tap a growing market.

Nvidia is also rolling out the new small language model, dubbed Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi-4B, with 4 billion parameters, for firms to use in developing their own AI models.

“The model was pruned, distilled and trained with a combination of real-world Hindi data, synthetic Hindi data and an equal amount of English data,” the company said in a statement.

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Indian IT services firm Tech Mahindra, is the first to use the Nvidia offering to develop a custom AI model called Indus 2.0, focused on Hindi and dozens of its dialects, the US firm said.

Banking, IT applications

Besides Tech Mahindra, Nvidia is partnering with India's other IT giants Infosys, TCS and Wipro, to train about half a million developers to design and deploy AI agents using its software.

Infosys on Thursday announced the launch of two small language models built using the NVIDIA AI stack, for banking and IT specific applications

Small language models (SLMs) are algorithms based on machine learning that are trained on a more specific dataset than large language models (LLMs).

The IT major said it plans to make foundational small language models available as a service so businesses could build on it.

“By integrating the NVIDIA AI stack with Infosys Topaz, we are taking advantage of very advanced enterprise AI capabilities to tackle unique business challenges, enhance operational efficiency, and deliver bespoke solutions that drive business value for our clients,” said Balakrishna DR, Executive Vice President, Global Services Head, AI and Industry Verticals, Infosys.

Developing chip with India

Nvidia had also proposed to develop a tailored-for-India chip in partnership with the Indian government or with Indian chip design companies, leveraging India's semiconductor design talent.

The proposal came about when Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Huang in the US earlier this year, according to media reports. At present, Huang is in India for the Nvidia AI summit.

The report also cited Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting and Electronics & IT, as confirming the matter. He added that discussions are at a preliminary stage currently.

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Nvidia would also be developing an India specific chip with the government currently thrashing out details like costing, benefits, and uses, as per reports citing unnamed official sources.

Patient care, research

Nvidia will also work with Flipkart to develop systems for conversational customer service. It also aims to partner with healthcare companies in India to enhance productivity in patient care and research.

Nvidia has a long history in India, establishing operations in Bangalore two decades ago and also creating development centres in three other cities. It currently employs 4,000 engineers, making India its largest employee base after the US itself.

In September last year, Reliance and Nvidia vowed to develop AI supercomputers in India and build large language models trained on its languages. Later that year, Nvidia unveiled a similar partnership with Tata Group.