Leap Forward

The chief executive of Yotta, a data-centre company, has taken on the responsibility of pushing India forward in the AI race

- Deepsekhar Choudhury

A picture of Sunil Gupta sitting on a truck full of Nvidia’s artificial intelligence (AI) chips will perhaps go down in history as the moment India edged ahead in the AI race. In March this year, Gupta’s company Yotta snagged the delivery of 4,000 Nvidia AI chips—the first such consignment to India.

This was at a moment when the world was competing to get such a delivery first, hoping it would put them ahead in the AI contest. Yotta scoring the delivery meant that India’s AI start-ups and scholars could build their AI models and applications at a data centre in India and make it cost less by paying in rupees instead of dollars.

The National Cause

Yotta’s AI data centre Shakti Cloud’s scalable infrastructure has significantly reduced training time, allowing researchers to focus more on innovation and less on infrastructure hurdles, says Manu Santhanam, professor and dean for industrial consultancy and sponsored research at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. More importantly, this has helped ensure that the datasets being used to train AI software in India would stay within the country’s borders.