After Reliance, NVIDIA Announces Partnership With Tata Group To Build AI Solutions

Indian conglomerate Tata Group on Friday (September 8) announced a partnership with US-based chipmaker NVIDIA to build the country’s first artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer.

The supercomputer will be powered by NVIDIA’s GH200 Grace Hopper superchip and offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform for AI services.

As part of the collaboration, NVIDIA and the Tata Group will work together to develop AI solutions on top of the chipmaker’s AI computing infrastructure and platforms. As per NVIDIA, the partnership will enable Indian startups and businesses to access state-of-the-art AI capabilities 

The two companies together will also develop an AI cloud in India that will enable Indian enterprises to transfer data across the AI cloud at high speeds. In addition, the conglomerate’s IT arm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will also utilise NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure and capabilities to build and process generative AI apps. 

Under the pact, TCS will upskill its workforce of 6 Lakh people to leverage the emerging technology. Besides, the Tata Group will also leverage the partnership to ‘catalyse AI-led transformation’ at its various companies from manufacturing to consumer businesses.

“… Our partnership with NVIDIA will democratise access to AI infrastructure, accelerate build-out of AI solutions and enable upgradation of AI talent at scale. Tata Group’s presence across sectors coupled with NVIDIA’s deep capabilities offers numerous opportunities for collaboration to advance India’s AI ambition,” said Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran.

Commenting on the partnership, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said, “The global generative AI race is in full steam… We are delighted to partner with Tata as they expand their cloud infrastructure service with NVIDIA AI supercomputing to support the exponential demand of generative AI startups and processing of large language models.”

This comes hours after Reliance’s Jio Platforms also announced a partnership with NVIDIA to build an advanced cloud-based AI computing infrastructure. Under the pact, Jio Platforms will get access to NVIDIA’s end-to-end AI supercomputer technologies, including CPU, GPU, networking, AI operating systems and frameworks for building AI models.

The move to partner with NVIDIA comes as Tata Group looks to leverage the emerging AI technology to power its IT business and bring efficiency to the operations of its companies. The conglomerate also wants to lead the ecosystem in building India-specific AI models and solutions.

As debate continues over the ethical use of the technology, Chandrasekaran recently said that AI would create more jobs in India. On the other hand, the government continues to push the homegrown AI ecosystem and has unveiled a slew of sops and incentives to help emerge India as an AI hub. 

As part of this, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) plans to host the maiden edition of the Global IndiaAI 2023 summit in October, which is expected to bring new investment opportunities and expertise in the field – all under one roof.