MeitY Looking Only At Domestic Firms For AI-Infra Tender, Final Bids Soon

The Union government is close to finalising bids for providing artificial-intelligence infrastructure services under its Rs 10,370-crore IndiaAI mission, according to two persons with knowledge of the matter.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, which is the nodal ministry for the IndiaAI Mission, is looking at domestic organisations that are supplying a minimum of 1,000 graphics processing units. Companies not manufacturing in India are not being looked at, and neither are startups that are being seen as users and not providers, they told NDTV Profit on the condition of anonymity.

The ministry has now received queries to the request for proposal and is in the process of providing responses. By next week, the companies will receive responses, following which it will take another 15 days for applications, the persons said.

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MeitY had pushed out an RFP in August, inviting expressions for interest and empanelment from companies.

Companies that are in the business of data centres and cloud service providers are now expected to submit final bids to provide high-speed computing AI infrastructure like GPUs, accelerators, tensor processing units, storage to academia, startups, researchers, government bodies and others at the lowest rate that will be discovered through the bidding process.

The GPUs are a unit of compute, which is an important and expensive element in building AI systems, making it difficult to procure for smaller companies.

The AI compute infrastructure is one of the seven pillars of the government's IndiaAI mission, which was approved in March. It focuses on creating a scalable AI computing ecosystem with over 10,000 GPUs through public-private partnerships to meet the demands of India's AI startups and research community.

Earlier this week, Lenovo started AI server manufacturing in India, leveraging its existing Puducherry plant. It plans to produce 50,000 enterprise AI servers and 2,400 high-end GPU units annually.

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