Why high-performance GPUs are critical for India AI Mission

In 2024, the government approved an investment of over ₹10,300 crore for the India AI Mission, a five-year initiative to develop India's artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem in the country.

- Rakesh Kumar @New Delhi

A major component of this mission is the establishment of a cutting-edge AI computing infrastructure, which will include the deployment of over 10,000 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) through collaborations between the public and private sectors.

The low-cost AI model from DeepSeek, R1, is now the most downloaded model across the globe, and AI experts are drawing comparisons with OpenAI's GPT-4. R1, a reasoning model, is trained with fewer chips compared with other models and so, it is cheaper.

Big companies are now coming up with reasoning models that cost huge money as these require computing resources to run. These models think and consider various approaches to generate a response. Be it OpenAI's GPT series models, R1, or Alibaba Cloud's reasoning AI model QwQ, these perform complex reasoning and arrive at solutions within seconds or minutes. Alibaba has now come up with a new version of its Qwen 2.5 model and it claims that the model outperforms across the board GPT-4, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3-1-405B.

Tech experts point out that budget, ₹5,000 crore has been specifically earmarked for this initiative.

This infrastructure will be critical for startups, researchers, and academia to test and deploy large language models (LLMs) and other AI solutions.

What is a GPU?