India Likely to Possess 46K GPUs in a Fortnight

India is expected to have around 46,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) in place by June 10, upon conclusion of the third round of bidding under the IndiaAI Mission, government officials said.

- AASHISH ARYAN

After the third round of bidding, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) will shift to a continuous empanelment process. Under this system, any company willing to match the lowest bid or per-hour cost for GPUs discovered during the first round of bidding will be eligible to supply these high-performance computing machines to participants in the ₹10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission, the officials said.

Results for the second round of GPU bidding were announced on Friday by Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw.

"Developing a common compute is a very important part of the principle of democratising technology for all. When we started, we targeted 10,000 GPUs. We had then thought that this would be a very big and ambitious target. But the kind of response we have seen is phenomenal," he said.

In the first round, the government received bids from 10 companies to procure and supply 18,693 GPUs, well above the initial 10,000-unit target.