At the AI Summit event in Mumbai, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said that AI should become the driver of India’s digital transformation, its economic growth and achieving a leading role on the global stage. According to the company’s press service, India has “amazing natural resources” for progress in the IT field and huge potential that has yet to be unlocked. According to Huang, the country must become a developer of its own AI, creating a national AI infrastructure based on its own resources and data.
The country’s leading cloud providers are rapidly increasing the capacity of their data centers, and NVIDIA intends to play a key role in the development of AI and offer its accelerators – their use should grow tenfold by the end of the year, becoming the basis of the economy based on AI systems. Together with NVIDIA, these companies are poised to achieve the biggest breakthrough in computing comparable to the IBM System 360 in 1964. And with the rapid development of AI infrastructure, smart manufacturing will also become critical to India’s future.
Image source: Sylwia Bartyzel / Unsplash
Huang outlined three key areas of AI development: sovereign AI (using one’s own data for innovation without transferring it abroad), “agent” AI for automating knowledge-intensive work, and “physical” AI for robotic and industrial systems. According to Huang, India can become a leader in all three areas. Local startups have already begun to use NVIDIA technologies for innovative solutions that bring solutions to the global market.
After Huang’s monologue, a dialogue took place with the chairman of Indian Reliance Industries, Mukesh Ambani. The heads of the companies discussed the prospects for transforming the Indian economy with the help of AI systems, including energy, telecommunications and manufacturing. Ambani emphasized that AI is also being used in the public sector to process local data, which is already changing the principles of management and service.
Image source: NVIDIA
Huang promised that AI will further democratize the use of technology—AI can be used by any citizen, opening up incredible opportunities for everyone. Of course, Huang emphasized NVIDIA’s role in this transformation. Now the company is already collaborating with Infosys, TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, etc., helping to improve the skills of about half a million developers. Ambani, in turn, emphasized that the country already has young, technically competent personnel.
Businessmen agreed that with a huge pool of talent, a growing tech ecosystem and huge data sets, the country has great potential to contribute to various economic sectors at the global level. Of course, this can only be done with the cooperation of companies – no single player is capable of such tasks.
Just the other day it was reported that India is discussing at the state level with NVIDIA the joint development of AI chips adapted to local specifics. The country is actively developing technologies related to artificial intelligence – it will spend $1.2 billion on a sovereign AI supercomputer with 10 thousand accelerators and its own LLMs, and is ready to buy accelerators in large volumes, including weakened versions that China did not get after tightening American sanctions.