Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has reportedly said that India will build its own foundational artificial intelligence (AI) model in the next 10 months.

As per news agency PTI, Vaishnaw said that the government will make available 18,000 high-end GPU-based compute facilities for AI development to entities across the country in the next couple of days, which will enable the development of the AI model.

He added that 10,000 GPUs are already available while the remaining 8,000 compute power will be rolled out in the next few days as the tender process for the same was completed last week.

The ambitious timeline comes barely days after the union government .

The IT Minister also projected that the country would be able to develop its own high-end graphics processing unit (GPU), in the next three to five years.

“We are working on multiple, actually three options, where we take a chipset which is at some reasonable level available in open source or available as a licensed thing, and then build upon that to build our own GPU. That’s the approach the entire world has followed and that approach will be able to give us India’s own GPU in the time frame of three to five years,” Vaishnaw said reportedly.

Vaishnaw also noted that high-end computing infrastructure was the basic requirement to develop AI models, adding that the Centre has instituted a mechanism to ensure people can access computing infrastructure at low cost.

“The researchers, startups, academicians, colleges, IITs, all of them can have access to this compute power, and they can start foundational models,” Vaishnaw reportedly said.

This follows the minister last week announcing that India would build its own large language model (LLM). Quickly afterwards, Centre’s flagship IndiaAI Mission floated a proposal inviting applications from Indian startups, researchers, and entrepreneurs to collaborate on building foundational AI models trained on Indian datasets.

Under the proposal, the Centre plans to offer equity-based funding as well as compute credits for the selected entity(s) that will undertake this task. The project will look to develop a scalable foundational AI model, which should be trained on diverse datasets and demonstrate capabilities to address India-specific challenges and opportunities across sectors.

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