All seven shortlisted firms have successfully cleared the technical round of the IndiaAI Mission’s second GPU tender, marking a significant step towards enhancing India's AI infrastructure. The commercial bids were opened on Thursday, with approximately 15,000 GPUs expected to be offered as part of this round. This mission, backed by a substantial Rs 10,000-crore budget, is strategically designed to bolster AI infrastructure within India, thereby fostering local model development and research capabilities.

The seven companies that qualified in the technical assessment include Netmagic (now known as NTT Global Data Centres and Cloud Infrastructure division), Cyfuture India, Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Yotta Data Services, and Ishan Infotech. The L1 (lowest) price for various GPU models, along with the names of the L1 bidders for each GPU variant, are expected to be disclosed next week.

Several bidders have already outlined their GPU offerings. Cyfuture has proposed to supply 1,184 GPUs, featuring a mix of Nvidia's H100, L40S, and A100 GPUs, as well as AMD's MI300 and MI325 GPUs, and Intel's Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 GPUs. Vensysco has put forth a proposal to offer 2,300 GPUs, including 2,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 100 AWS Trainium 1 GPUs, and 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs. Yotta Data Services has indicated its intention to offer Nvidia Blackwell B200s. The specific GPU models proposed by NTT-Netmagic, Sify, Locuz, and Ishan remain undisclosed.

Notably, Vensysco and Locuz are partners with Amazon Web Services, while Ishan collaborates with Oracle, and NTT-Netmagic is a prominent Google Cloud partner in India. In the first round of the GPU tender, which concluded in February, the IndiaAI Mission is set to provide 14,517 GPUs at subsidized rates to startups, academics, and research institutions across the country.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has reportedly assigned AI projects, or workloads, to three companies selected to supply GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission. However, the government has not yet disclosed the names of the beneficiaries of this program. The India AI Mission, approved by the cabinet in March of the previous year, aims to establish a robust AI compute infrastructure by procuring over 10,000 GPUs. The mission also seeks to incentivize the development of local language models by academia and industry, offering investment capital and other forms of support, all in an effort to strengthen India’s AI capabilities.

The IndiaAI Mission has received 506 foundation AI model proposals across three phases. Sarvam.ai was selected to begin developing an indigenous foundational model. Sarvam will receive access to 4,096 Nvidia H100 GPUs for six months from the IndiaAI Mission's common compute cluster to train its model.