Govt Seeks Bids To Empanel AI Infra Providers Under India AI Mission

The government has reportedly sought bids for the empanelment of entities to offer artificial intelligence services on cloud under the INR 10,372 Cr-India AI Mission, approved by the Cabinet in March.

As per PTI’s report, the selected empaneled agencies like data centres and cloud service providers will facilitate access to high-speed computing AI infrastructure, including graphics processing units (GPUs), accelerators, Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), and storage for academia, startups, researchers, and government bodies, at the most competitive rates found through the bidding process.

The IndiaAI Mission aims to create an AI ecosystem, offering supercomputing capabilities comprising over 10,000 GPUs to various stakeholders. 

Abhishek Singh, additional secretary at MeitY, highlighted the initiative’s importance in a LinkedIn post, saying, “With an objective to empanel service providers for making this possible, India AI – an IBD under Digital India Corporation, MeitY has issued a RFE (request for empanelment).”

“India AI will approve the end users who can access these cloud-based AI services, ensuring that the services are provided at prices determined through a transparent and competitive process,” as per RFE document.

Service providers will be empaneled for 36 months, with potential extensions based on mutual agreements. While this invitation is not a procurement agreement, it seeks proposals from eligible and interested bidders. MeitY has set September 6 as the deadline for bid submissions.

The IndiaAI Mission comprises the following pillars:

• IndiaAI Compute Capacity: It envisions building a cutting-edge, scalable AI computing infrastructure by deploying more than 10,000 Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) through PPP model
• IndiaAI Innovation Centre (IAIC): With this, the Centre is looking to create a leading academic institution to retain top research talent, develop and deploy indigenous large multimodal models (LMMs) and domain-specific models
• IndiaAI Datasets Platform: This platform will be developed by IndiaAI’s independent business division (IBD) and will look to enhance accessibility, quality, and utility of public sector datasets
• IndiaAI FutureSkills: This program will focus on expanding the accessibility of graduate and post-graduate AI programs as well establishing AI Labs to impart foundational-level courses in the domain.

This comes at a time when the usage of AI, especially generative AI (GenAI), is increasing rapidly across the globe. While AI is expected to solve problems across countries and sectors, there are also concerns about its misuse.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi mentioned the potential for AI misuse without proper training. 

The Centre also issued an advisory earlier this year, asking digital platforms to get government’s approval before launching “under-tested” or “unreliable” AI models. However, the advisory was withdrawn following criticism from the industry.

Amid all these, AI adoption is on the rise in the country and a number of AI startups have emerged over the past few years.