India could come up with its own high-end computing chipset, also called GPUs, in the next 3-5 years while a local foundational AI platform is expected in 10 months, said Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Tuesday.
Addressing a Budget Roundtable 2025 organized by India Today & Business Today, Vaishnaw said that the government will make available 18,000 high-end GPU-based compute facilities for AI development to entities in the country in the next couple of days and expects India's own AI platform within 10 months.
"We are working on multiple, actually three options, where we take a chipset which is at some reasonable level available in open source or available as a licensed thing, and then build upon that to build our own GPU. That's the approach the entire world has followed and that approach will be able to give us India's own GPU in the time frame of three to five years," Vaishnaw said.
Earlier, the GPUs were used for processing multimedia content where lots of computing processes were required, such as gaming, video processing, etc.
However, demand for GPUs has skyrocketed after massive demand for AI across the world and US chip company Nvidia dominates the market with over 80 per cent share. The minister said that several start-ups have developed very efficiently, though small compared to ChatGPT, AI models and Indian Railways improved confirmed ticket rate by 27 per cent using AI models.
"We already deployed 18,000 GPUs, very high-end GPUs, and out of that, 10,000 are already available. So this 18,000 compute power will be deployed in about a couple of days. The tender process got completed last week and, in another couple of days, that is, 3-4 days, this will be deployed," said Vaishnaw.
He said, "High-end computing infrastructure is the basic requirement to develop AI models, and that can be bought by deep pockets, but the government has put in a mechanism where people can access this computing infrastructure at low cost.
"The researchers, startups, academicians, colleges, IITs-all of them can have access to this compute power, and they can start foundational models," Vaishnaw said.
When asked for how long it will take before India has its own AI foundational model, Vaishnaw said "10 months is the outer limit."
He said that there are many research papers, basically mathematical algorithms that have been used by, say Chinese AI company DeepSeek to make the entire process very efficient.
"Many of our researchers and startups are also reading some of those papers. There are some papers of 2003 and 2005 which basically tell you how to do a lot of good engineering on the process," Vaishnaw said.
During the interaction, the minister refuted claims by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and said that licence raj from 1950-1990 killed the entire manufacturing and production ecosystem in the country and now the Make in India program of the government has been a big success.
Under the mobile manufacturing segment under the Make in India, the government has created 12 lakh direct and indirect jobs, said Vaishnaw.
To explain the level of quality and precision achieved by Indian electronic companies he showed a metallic where no line was visible with naked eyes but it consisted of various pieces joined together with a high level of precision.
He said that it took 3 years for a leading Indian company to achieve high level of precision that is required by a vendor to supply parts for manufacturing high-end mobile phones of Apple and Samsung.
The minister further said that now India manufactures quite a few items and parts required in the mobile phone industry that include chargers, battery packs, mechanics of all types, USB cables, keypads, display assembly, camera module, lithium ion cells, speaker and microphone, vibrator motor, etc.
"Four decades, from 1950 to 1990 were lost when this entire manufacturing and production ecosystem was killed by licensed permit raj",.
"First opening happened in 1990. Then when (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee ji came, he also did a major opening. After that, our Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji has opened up many sectors through his Make in India programme.
"I wish we had started when China started in 1979 but never too late, we are doing good in Make in India," Vaishnaw said.
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