Nilekani-Backed Open Cloud Compute Could Challenge Big Tech's Data Centre Raj In India

India's tech visionary-backed platform, which democratises access to data centres, could be the solution to the country's growing need for compute power and to rival Big Tech's dominance.

Nandan Nilekani-backed EkStep Foundation launched Open Cloud Compute on May 7 in partnership with People+AI in a bid to enable access to compute infrastructure.

Nilekani held a closed-door session with 24 organisations, technology providers and manufacturing service firms, of which only four—Oracle, AMD, Dell and IBM—were American.

The rest were homegrown, such as Von Neumann AI, Vigyan Labs, Protean Cloud, Dixon Technologies Ltd., and even biggies such as Tata Communication and Open Network for Digital Commerce.

The project is christened a UPI moment for cloud compute access. Going beyond reliability at a few large data centres currently in the country, the open cloud commute project will expand the network of providers for companies of all sizes and provide cheaper costs.

"Over the next few years, demand for compute will go up due to increased digitalisation and AI, and the global cloud compute market is expected to triple in size," said Tanvi Lall, director of strategy at People+ai.

To plug in the emerging demand-supply gap at the population scale, the only way ahead is to take a digital public infrastructure approach to unlocking access to compute at scale, she said.

The platform, named OCC, would enable those looking for compute power and those providing it at whatever scale to be connected and transact directly on the platform, for a fraction of the cost of large, public server providers. It also puts to rest concerns around data sovereignty, as all data gets stored within country limits and not at the hands of overseas companies.

"The interconnected micro-cloud computing infrastructure aims to unite numerous independent providers on a single network, enhancing their discoverability and utilisation. Users of this infrastructure would have access to computing power and related services from many providers," she said.

"It will enable many microcomputing providers, potentially in the hundreds, to unite and create a megacomputing network powered by trust. As Nandan once said, micro is the new mega," said Dr. Pramod Varma, chief technology officer, EkStep Foundation.