India makes its bets as AI chip race hots up

The country is expanding computing power for its AI mission. That's happening as rising competition between Google, Nvidia and other technology giants may lead to lowering costs for domestic startups

- Avik Das & Aashish Aryan

Google and Nvidia’s competition in the artificial intelligence chip ecosystem briefly unsettled global markets last month but for India’s AI ambitions the impact is marginal — at least for now.

When reports in late November said that Meta Platforms (the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) may use Google's in-house Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for its upcoming data centres, it knocked down Nvidia's stock nearly 3 percent. It also reignited the debate over whether Nvidia, the world’s chip leader, is finally facing credible competition. Nvidia was quick to respond, publicly welcoming Google’s progress while asserting that its own chips remain “a generation ahead of the industry”.

Government officials and industry executives in India say Google’s growing influence in AI hardware does not materially change the country’s Al road map, which uses chips made by Nvidia, AMD and Intel. Rather, Nvidia chips have been particularly preferred for the training of large language models (LLMs, an Al model trained on vast text data to generate human-like language).

‘A choice in chips matters for India. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are specialised chips designed for graphics and image processing. They have become essential for managing the high-demand computation required by modern Al workloads. TPUs are Google's task-specific ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits). They excel at AI computation, especially inferencing — the process of using a trained AI model to make a prediction on a new set of data.

“Though Google’s TPUs will have different capabilities compared to Nvidia's GPUs, a crowded market always helps in bringing the price down,” said a government official, who did not want to be named.