DeepSeek On Indian Servers Soon To Address Privacy Concerns: Union Minister

DeepSeek On Indian Servers Soon To Address Privacy Concerns: Union Minister

SUMMARY

In a press conference on IndiaAI Mission, Ashiwini Vaishnaw said that since DeepSeek is an open source AI model, it can be hosted on Indian servers

He added that all the open source models will soon be hosted on Indian servers in line with the country’s data privacy concerns

The development comes on the back of the ministry of electronics and (MeitY) releasing the draft rules for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act for public consultations till February 18

Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has said that India will soon host Chinese AI platform DeepSeek on local servers to address the privacy concerns regarding the cross-border data transfer.

In a press conference on IndiaAI Mission, the minister said that since DeepSeek is an open source AI model and can be hosted on Indian servers.

“Our team is already working on this project. We have prepared the framework and other details such as how many servers are required and how much capacity is required,” Vaishnaw said.

He added that all the open source models will soon be hosted on Indian servers, in line with the country’s data privacy concerns.

Recently, DeepSeek sent shockwaves in the technology ecosystem when it managed to develop its own LLM with only 2,000 Nvidia H800 GPUs. For context, OpenAI relies on 1 Lakh GPUs (the more advanced H100) for its ChatGPT-4. Moreover, the Chinese company claimed to achieve this with an investment of just $6 Mn against OpenAIs $100 Mn investment.

The development comes at a time when data protection has emerged as a key focus area and the government is working to protect the digital data of Indians.

Recently, the electronic and IT ministry (MeitY) released the draft rules for the Digital Personal Data Protection Act for public consultations till February 18.

The draft says that data fiduciaries (entities that determine how personal data is processed) will need to provide data principals (end users whose data they are collecting) all specific details on the basis of which they can give an informed consent to the latter on whether they can use their personal data or not.

Meanwhile, the success of DeepSeek has also ignited a debate in India on the need for the country to build its own foundational models. In the conference, Vaishnaw said that India plans to build its own large language models under the IndiaAI Mission.