NEW DELHI: Marking a major leap in India’s artificial intelligence ambitions, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) on Friday announced that the country’s common compute capacity has crossed 34,000 GPUs, a significant milestone in building indigenous AI infrastructure under the IndiaAI Mission.

At the 'IndiaAI – Make AI in India, Make AI Work for India' event, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw emphasized the goal of making India a global leader in AI by democratizing access to technology. “Technology should not be left in the hands of a few. Our vision is to ensure every citizen can benefit from and contribute to AI innovation,” he said.

Three New Startups to Build Indian Foundation Models
The minister revealed that three more startups have been selected to build large-scale foundation AI models trained on India-specific datasets, joining Sarvam AI which was earlier chosen for the task.

Soket AI will develop a 120-billion parameter model optimized for India’s linguistic diversity.

Gnani AI will build a 14-billion parameter voice AI model with multilingual, real-time capabilities.

Gan AI will create a 70-billion parameter text-to-speech model with "superhuman" abilities to rival global leaders.

These models will cater to key sectors such as healthcare, education, governance, and defense.

Compute Power Expanded with Industry Partnerships
India’s national AI compute capacity has now grown to 34,333 GPUs, up from 18,417, through partnerships with seven private data infrastructure firms including CyFuture, Netmagic, Yotta, and Sify. The shared cloud-based platform will provide compute access for training and deploying Indian AI models, ensuring affordability and wide access for startups and research institutions.

The winners of the IndiaAI I4C CyberGuard Hackathon, held in partnership with the Ministry of Home Affairs, were also announced. These solutions will help enhance the classification of cybercrime complaints and enable pattern recognition from complex inputs like handwritten FIRs and audio calls on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal.

So far, 367 datasets have been uploaded to AI Kosh, India’s AI data repository. The government reiterated its commitment to fostering a comprehensive and ethical AI ecosystem focused on computing infrastructure, safety standards, talent development, and reverse brain drain.

IndiaAI functions as an Independent Business Division under MeitY and serves as the nodal agency for implementing the IndiaAI Mission.

“India is not just catching up—it is aiming to lead the AI wave,” said Minister Vaishnaw, urging selected teams to aim for global top-five performance in their respective AI sectors.