Tech giants NVIDIA, OpenAI see India leading AI revolution

Technology giants Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and OpenAI are committed to supporting India’s artificial intelligence (AI) ambition and think India will not only shape the AI revolution but also lead it.

“The idea of a sovereign AI resides in a nation owning and processing its intelligence. By doing so India will not just participate in the AI revolution but rather shape it,” Vishal Dhupar, South Asia managing director of Nvidia, a world leader in AI computing, said at the Global India AI Summit, a two-day event that involved industry and startup veterans, AI practitioners, academicians, students, and officials from national and provincial governments.

India, the world’s fastest-growing major economy, aims to become a global information technology (IT) service provider and an IT product superpower while leveraging technology to boost economic growth and international recognition. In 2024, India became the lead chair of GPAI (Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence). GPAI is a multi-stakeholder initiative with 29 member countries, which aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice by supporting research and applied activities on AI-related priorities.

“We’re keeping India in mind in whatever important decisions that we are making,” said Srinivas Narayanan, Vice President of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, while speaking at the Global India AI Summit.

The statements from top officials at Nividia and OpenAI come at a time when the South Asian powerhouse said it intends to “democratize” technology and AI and make it accessible to all, simultaneously investing in AI-focused common-use public platforms, which can be used by one and all to innovate, develop and deliver products and services.

“India, of course, will build its own national highway for AI. This highway will be for tomorrow’s economy. It will allow citizens to access it. It will let our researchers explore, invent and innovate,” Dhupar of Nvidia said.

“With the national [AI] highways, we will have a possibility to codify our rich culture, our own common sense, our own sensibilities, into a large language model and beyond. With it will be our mission to explore the worlds from Biology to Physics, healthcare to climate,” Dhupar added.

Earlier this month, Nvidia signed a memorandum of understanding with India’s Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology (TIET) to establish the Thapar School of Advanced AI & Data Science (TSAAI) with technical support from the Nvidia AI University program. The collaboration aims to offer a range of academic programs, research opportunities, and innovation projects to empower both students and faculty with essential AI skills and knowledge.

In June, software giants IBM (NASDAQ: IBM), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), and the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) collaborated with the Gujarat provincial government to promote the use of AI in the western Indian state. The partnership aims to establish and promote an “AI Cluster” to foster innovation and collaboration among financial institutions at Gujarat International Finance Tec (GIFT) City.

India’s ‘shining’ AI mission

Narayanan of OpenAI said that India’s AI mission is a “shining example,” and it sets a great example not just for the Global South but around the world for what an end-to-end public investment in generative AI might look like.

“India has a unique approach to making this technology beneficial for people through initiatives like the digital public infrastructure which has created transformative services like Unified Payments Interface (UPI),” Narayanan said.

In March, India approved $1.24 billion for the next five years to boost the country’s AI ecosystem, innovation, and entrepreneurship. The initiative is expected to bolster India’s global leadership in AI and ensure ethical and responsible AI deployment.

India will procure over 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) to address India’s computing capacity needs and develop a high-end AI ecosystem.

“We launched ChatGPT just 1.5 years ago. We thought it would be a low-key research preview but in the last 18 months we have seen that people are using it in really transformative ways and it’s impacting people’s daily lives in all sorts of ways that we hadn’t Imagined,” Narayanan of OpenAI said.

“In India, this has created a new interface to computing. It’s a natural way to engage with technology that is conversational and we are using that to get things done. What this shows is that when you have generally intelligent systems, people are able to put them to use in lots of different applications. Providing expertise at scale is one of the most important challenges for society and so we are seeing AI being used in lots of new industries across the world,” Narayanan pointed out.

According to a report by International Data Corporation (IDC), AI and Generative AI (GenAI) adoption in India—including software, services, and hardware for AI-centric systems—has significantly increased. Spending is projected to reach $6 billion by 2027 and has a compound annual growth rate of 33.7% for the 2022-2027 period. Comparatively, IDC forecasts that worldwide AI spending will exceed $512 billion by 2027, more than double its 2024 market size.

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