In a groundbreaking collaboration, US technology titan NVIDIA has joined forces with the billionaire magnate Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries to embark on an ambitious journey to construct cutting-edge AI supercomputers within the Indian landscape. The announcement heralds a remarkable stride towards pioneering AI infrastructure, poised to be over an order of magnitude more potent than India’s current fastest supercomputer.
The genesis of this partnership was preceded by a pivotal meeting between NVIDIA’s visionary founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The convergence of minds set the stage for a historic alliance that promises to reshape the technological landscape of India.
NVIDIA, which established its footprint in India back in 2004, currently boasts four engineering development centers strategically located in Gurugram, Hyderabad, Pune, and Bengaluru, housing a workforce exceeding 3,800 professionals. This formidable collaboration with Reliance Industries charts an extraordinary trajectory – the development of India’s very own foundational large language model, meticulously trained to resonate with the nation’s diverse linguistic tapestry. This model is custom-tailored for generative AI applications, poised to cater to the needs of the world’s most populous nation.
As part of this transformative venture, NVIDIA will provide access to the cutting-edge GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and the DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service in the cloud. The GH200 represents a revolutionary paradigm shift in computing architecture, endowing it with unparalleled performance and monumental memory bandwidth.
“The NVIDIA-powered AI infrastructure,” as articulated in the official statement, “is the bedrock of the new frontier in AI for Reliance Jio Infocomm, the telecom arm of Reliance Industries. The global AI revolution is reshaping industries and daily life. To harness India’s vast potential in AI, Reliance will develop AI applications and services for their 450 million Jio customers and provide energy-efficient AI infrastructure to scientists, developers, and startups across India.”
This pioneering initiative is poised to transform multiple facets of Indian society. AI will empower rural farmers to access vital information, such as weather updates and crop prices, through cell phones in their local languages. It will enable expert diagnosis of medical symptoms and imaging scans at a massive scale, bridging the gap where doctors may not be immediately available.
Furthermore, AI will bolster the prediction of cyclonic storms by leveraging decades of atmospheric data, enabling timely evacuations and shelter for those at risk. The AI infrastructure is slated to be housed in AI-ready computing data centers that will ultimately scale up to a staggering 2,000 MW. The execution and management of this endeavor will fall under the purview of Jio, leveraging its extensive expertise across mobile telephony, 5G spectrum, fiber networks, and more.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, expressed his enthusiasm about the partnership, stating, “India has scale, data, and talent. With the most advanced AI computing infrastructure, Reliance can build its own large language models that power generative AI applications made in India, for the people of India.”
Mukesh Ambani, the Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries, emphasized the transformative potential of this collaboration, underscoring that, “As India advances from a country of data proliferation to creating technology infrastructure for widespread and accelerated growth, computing and technology super centers like the one we envisage with NVIDIA will provide the catalytic growth just like Jio did to our nation’s digital march.”
His son and Chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, Akash Ambani, echoed the sentiment, pledging Jio’s unwavering commitment to fuel India’s technology renaissance. This partnership with NVIDIA, he asserted, is a significant stride towards democratizing access to cutting-edge technologies and nurturing India’s journey towards becoming an AI powerhouse. Together, they are set to forge a state-of-the-art AI cloud infrastructure that is secure, sustainable, and profoundly relevant to India’s trajectory, propelling the nation into the AI-driven future.
