Employees of Yotta Data Services unload recently acquired Nvidia H100 chips from a vehicle at the company’s data center in Navi Mumbai, India, on Thursday, March 14, 2024. Credit – Dhiraj Singh—Bloomberg/Getty Images
AWhile addressing shareholders in a much-anticipated annual speech on Thursday, Asia’s richest man Mukesh Ambani also unveiled “JioBrain,” a suite of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and applications that he says will transform a range of businesses in energy, textiles, telecommunications and more that make up his multinational conglomerate, Reliance Industries. “By perfecting JioBrain within Reliance, we are creating a powerful AI services platform that we can offer to other enterprises as well,” Ambani said during his speech.
The Reliance Chairman’s latest offering comes as India emerges as a crucial player in the global AI ecosystem, with a robust $250 billion IT industry that serves many of the world’s banks, manufacturers and enterprises. As the world’s most populous country, India also has a robust workforce of nearly 5 million programmers at a time when AI talent is in short supply globally, with analysts predicting that India’s AI services could be worth $17 billion by 2027, according to a recent report by Nasscom and BCG.
Puneet Chandok, president, Microsoft India & South Asia, points to research showing that India has one of the highest AI adoption rates among knowledge workers, with 92% using generative AI at work – significantly higher than the global average of 75%. “These insights highlight the significant impact of AI on the Indian workforce and the proactive steps both employees and leaders are taking to integrate AI into their daily routines,” Chandok says, adding that the company is also driving initiatives aimed at empowering 2 million people with AI skills by 2025.
The spotlight on India comes at a time when many countries around the world are looking to promote their own competing AI systems rather than look to the US or China. Over the past few years, the Indian government has nurtured an ecosystem where global players like Google and Meta, Indian companies like Reliance Jio and Tata Consulting Services, and local startups can take advantage of the cost-efficient technology landscape.
India’s ‘bottom-up’ approach to AI
India is also aiming to have what Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s former minister for electronics and information technology, calls “sovereign AI,” integrating large-scale models into sectors such as health, agriculture and governance to spur economic growth. In March, the government raised $1.25 billion in investment for an ambitious “IndiaAI Mission,” which will support the development of computing infrastructure, startups and the use of AI applications in the public sector.
“Interestingly, the government itself is the main driver of India’s AI transformation,” says Jibu Elias, a leading AI researcher and ethicist who helped found IndiaAI. Elias says the push has accelerated since 2020. “We want India to become a global AI tool garage, especially for the Global South.”
“The idea is that if you can build tools that address some of the socio-economic challenges that India has faced for decades, they can be applied around the world,” he continues.
It’s a method that Arvind Gupta, head of the New Delhi-based Digital India Foundation, calls a “bottom-up” approach: “Unlike the Googles and Microsofts of the world, India has taken it to the next level by building trust in technology with digital public infrastructure,” he says. Digital public infrastructure, also known as DPI, is a public-private partnership pioneered by the government nearly a decade ago that combines technology, governance and civil society. It extends to a biometric identification system, a rapid payment system and permission-based data sharing that now gives India’s 1.4 billion citizens access to public services.
Gupta says DPI is instrumental in giving India a leg up in the global AI race. With 900 million Indians connected to the internet, he points out that India is “the data capital of the world,” which has “leapfrogged the whole culture of artificial intelligence.” That’s because much of this data exists in public datasets that companies can use to write their own AI algorithms. “You won’t see that anywhere else in the world,” Gupta says.
The race to build LLMs as Chipmakers set their sights on Indian market
With so much data publicly available, a slew of Indian startups are now racing to build their own large language models, or LLMs, which harness generative AI by learning from vast amounts of data. And in a country where people speak more than a dozen languages, “India’s diverse and multilingual environment makes it an ideal testing ground for developing and refining global AI solutions,” says Microsoft’s Chandok.
In January, Krutrim, an AI startup founded by entrepreneur Bhavish Aggarwal whose name translates to “artificial” in Sanskrit, became India’s first unicorn when it secured $50 million in funding from top Silicon Valley investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners and billionaire Vinod Khosla. Similarly, Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam recently launched a voice-enabled AI bot that supports over 10 Indian languages using open-source software after raising $41 million. The government is also complementing this innovation by building “targeted LLMs” that can perform real-time language translation for citizens using public services, Gupta added.
Still, India’s AI push can’t accelerate without computing power and shared resources. To fill that gap, the Indian government last month completed the purchase of 1,000 graphics processing units, or GPUs, to provide computing power to AI makers. Last September, chipmaker Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited India to talk with Modi and tech executives, pitching the company to the country as a potential location for chip manufacturing as the U.S. increasingly cracks down on high-end chip exports from China. “You have the data, you have the talent,” Huang told Modi at the time. “This is going to be one of the largest AI markets in the world.” In March, the first shipment of Nvidia chips arrived in Indian data centers after the company partnered with Indian cloud services company Yotta, making Shakti Cloud India’s fastest AI supercomputing infrastructure.
Against this backdrop, billionaire-owned Indian companies are not looking to be left behind. In July, India’s largest software company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), invested heavily in a $1.5 billion-plus generative AI project pipeline. Gautam Adani, Asia’s second-richest person, announced a joint venture with the UAE in December to explore AI and diversify into digital services.
And as for Ambani, who has urged his employees to accelerate AI transformation across companies this year, the goal is clear: “We need to be at the forefront of using data, with AI as a tool to achieve a quantum leap in productivity and efficiency,” the billionaire told Reliance employees.
Since then, Reliance’s telecom company, Jio, has partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology to launch “Bharat GPT,” a ChatGPT-like service for Indian users. A video played at a Reliance event showed how the speech-to-text tool would work if successful: a motorcycle mechanic speaks to the AI bot in his native Tamil language, a banker uses the tool in Hindi, and a developer in Hyderabad writes computer code in Telegu.
“It’s like a joint Indian family,” said Ganesh Ramakrishnan, the chair of IIT Bombay’s computer science and engineering department. “We depend on each other, and together we do better.”
Write to Astha Rajvanshi at astha.rajvanshi@time.com.