Krutrim To Launch AI Chips By 2026, Expands Cloud Services

Unveiling future plans for Ola Group’s third unicorn Krutrim at its annual event, CEO and founder Bhavish Aggarwal announced plans to develop India’s first homegrown family of chips for artificial intelligence, general compute and Edge.

The family of chips includes Bodhi for AI, Sarv for general compute, and Ojas for Edge. The startup is targeting to launch the first chip by 2026. Furthermore, Bodhi 2 will be launched by 2028.

Krutrim said it has forged strategic partnerships with Arm and Untether AI for the development of CPU and AI chips, platforms, and systems.

Aggarwal also said that Krutrim will scale up its data centre capacity to 1 GW by 2028 from the current 20 MW.

“The data centre will be a computing and data storage powerhouse, enabling Krutrim to offer world-class AI services to India and the world,” the startup said in a statement.

“Amidst rapidly changing technology paradigms, India has a unique opportunity to become a global superpower in technologies of the future such as AI. India being the source for 20% of the world’s data and home to one of the largest tech talent pools, is fully equipped to lead the AI wave,” Aggarwal said.

Krutrim Cloud Expands Services

Krutrim said that in order to support the growing demand for AI, traditional and cloud-native application workloads, Krutrim Cloud will expand its services to cover infrastructure domains, developer platforms, data platforms, AI models, AI platforms and AI applications.

As of now, the cloud is live for Ola Electric and Ola Consumer (erstwhile Ola Cabs). The group is leveraging the cloud for a language hub with multimodal translation capabilities, customer servicing with AI (Ola group’s customer service has been replaced by AI service centre) and Maps APIs & SDKs to enable intelligent search for enterprises.

Ola’s transition from Azure to Krutrim happened back in May, when Aggarwal had a spat with Microsoft over “pronoun illness” in posts on LinkedIn. He had also invited other companies to exit Azure and move to its Indian stack back then.

Speaking with the media at the sidelines of today’s event, Aggarwal said that the incentive of making the transition free for a limited time may push many Indian companies to move to an Indian cloud operator.

Moving forth, Krutrim Cloud will offer about 50 new services, including virtual machines (VMs), cloud storage, state-of-the-art security measures for data protection, and observability features for precise data monitoring.

Krutrim claims that the cloud offers a wide range of purpose-built AI services that can allow Indian developers to reduce costs for technology products. The startup claims that over 25K developers are actively using Krutrim Cloud and 250 Bn API calls have been made across products since its launch.

To lure in more developers, the AI unicorn announced free cloud services worth INR 100 Cr for developers till Diwali 2025. It will also allow free access to developers working on the ONDC platform for a year.

Further, the startup also launched ‘Krutrim for Startups’ – Udaan programme with INR 50 lakh for the first cohort of startups in partnership with investors Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India), DeVC, and South Park Commons.

The startup has been working on these updates for sometime. Back in December 2023, Ravi Jain, head of strategy at Ola Electric, told Inc42 that the company is actively designing and developing in-house technologies such as a submersion cooling system for cloud infrastructure and chip designs.

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