Nvidia’s partnership with Reliance, Tatas to boost India’s AI infrastructure | Mint

Mumbai/New Delhi: India’s top industrial conglomerates Reliance Industries Ltd and Tata group will be joining hands with leading global chipmaker Nvidia Corp. to build infrastructure for artificial intelligence applications in the country.

In a buoyant stance that reinstates the Indian government’s bullish approach towards AI, Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia and among the world’s top AI executives, said at the company’s AI Summit in Mumbai that the partnerships will be critical to ensuring that India manufactures “its own AI—and not export data to import intelligence”.

“In order to lead in artificial intelligence, you need to have AI model technology… You need to have data, massive quantities of data,” Huang said while announcing Nvidia’s partnership with Reliance Industries during a fireside chat with RIL chairman Mukesh Ambani on Thursday.

India’s key strength lies in its “large industry of computer scientists… This computing industry is going to become the intelligence industry”, Huang added. “Leveraging on enormous amounts of data, as well as a large population of consumers to drive that flywheel—of intelligence to data and data to intelligence—is extraordinary.”

Ambani said during the chat with Huang that Nvidia will partner with Reliance to set up a 1GW (gigawatt) data centre in Jamnagar, Gujarat. The project, Ambani said, “will be scalable as new iterations of Nvidia’s technology come in the future, and will be powered using renewable energy”.

As for the Tata group, A.S. Lakshminarayanan, chief executive of Tata Communications Ltd, said in a press statement that the network and computing infrastructure provider will adopt Nvidia’s latest chips, ‘Hopper’, by the end of the year to power “one of the largest supercomputers on cloud in India”.

Next year, Tata Communications, which manages global live streaming of sports such as Formula One motor racing, will also adopt Nvidia’s latest ‘Blackwell’ chips—which is expected to ship to Indian ventures before the end of this year.

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These developments position India as a key revenue generator for the world’s biggest technology companies, making the market more relevant for Big Tech than ever before.

India, with its rising economic power and geopolitical relevance, has long been a strategically key market. Now, with an increase in government incentives and private-sector investments, such as Nvidia’s partnerships with Reliance and Tata, the country may emerge as one of the biggest overall markets for US tech giants.

India’s AI Mission

Two senior government officials with direct knowledge of the developments said Nvidia is “in constant touch” with the Centre “to help understand where and how compute infrastructure can be ramped up”—although the discussions do not necessarily position Nvidia at the forefront of India’s AI Mission.

“We are not separately speaking with Nvidia for the AI Mission’s public-private partnership model of compute infrastructure procurement—this is a bidding operation, and any foreign or domestic firm can bid upon,” one of the officials said. “The winning bidder will be selected based on who offers the best pricing for compute infrastructure.”

The second official said both Reliance Industries and Tata group are applicants in the India AI Mission.

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Nvidia’s partnership with Reliance’s Jio Platforms, therefore, stands independent of the US firm’s discussions with the Indian government and is a pure-play commercial development.

During the discussion with Huang, Ambani said Reliance’s goal will be to “repeat a ‘Jio’ for AI to be really affordable and available to the common people”—referring to the impact the company had in telecommunications when its subsidiary, Reliance Jio Infocomm, launched 4G services in 2016.

Nvidia is also integrating its chips with Netweb Technologies India Ltd and E2E Networks Ltd for enterprise data centre adoption. In terms of software, Reliance Industries and mobility startup Ola Electric Mobility Ltd are adopting Nvidia’s digital twins and metaverse platform, Omniverse. 

Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Tech Mahindra Ltd also unveiled dedicated Nvidia business units.

Hiranandani Group’s data centre firm Yotta Data Services also announced a wider availability of Nvidia AI applications and services on its Nvidia-powered cloud service, ‘Shakti’.

India: A front office in global technology

Nvidia’s focus on India is a natural evolution, said industry experts. 

“One of the biggest verticals that Nvidia is betting on today is sovereign AI. There are Big Tech firms that have capital at scale to invest heavily in compute infrastructure. Beyond this, the only ones that have money to spend on compute are governments around the world,” said Jaspreet Bindra, founder of tech consultancy firm AI&Beyond. 

“With India’s bullish stance on AI, it is no surprise that Nvidia is betting big on India—and this stance and mutual hype is likely to continue in the near future.”

Also read | Nvidia’s graphic processing units have set off a gold rush of the AI age

Nvidia, the world’s second-most valuable company with a market cap of $3.42 trillion, has emerged as one of the world’s most influential companies with the advent of generative AI—hot on the back of OpenAI’s ChatGPT launch in November 2022. Prior to ChatGPT’s launch, Nvidia’s market cap was around $275 billion.

In March, Huang told Mint as part of a media roundtable that Nvidia was “absolutely keen to be available if India is looking for AI chips”. 

Huang added that innovating on AI could “help India become the front office in global technology, generate greater value, and no longer be the back office for all the world’s technology”.

With inputs from Pratishtha Bagai.