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BUSINESS EYE SEPTEMBER 29, 2023 | The Indian Eye 46

Why and how Nvidia Corp is betting on

India in is global plan for high-end chips

Infosys plans to set up an NVIDIA Centre of Excellence, where it will train and certify 50,000 of
its employees to provide generative AI expertise to its vast network of customers across industries

OUR BUREAU
Mumbai
uring a five-day tour of India earlier this
month, Nvidia Corp chief executive officer
DJensen Huang visited four cities, dined with
tech executives and researchers, took numerous
selfies, and sat for a one-on-one conversation with
Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the AI sector.
For Nvidia, whose graphics processors are
vital to the development of artificial intelligence
systems, the South Asian nation of 1.4 billion peo-
ple presents a rare opportunity. As the US increas-
ingly clamps down on exports of high-end chips to
China and the world seeks an alternative electron-
ics manufacturing base, India could shape up to be
a source of AI talent, site for chip production and
market for Nvidia’s products.
Nvidia and India have a shared interest in
betting on, and speeding up, the country’s AI as-
cendancy. Chipmakers cannot sell top-end micro-
processors to China, which accounts for a fifth of
Nvidia’s sales, amid fears the chips could be used
to develop autonomous weaponry or wage cy-
berwarfare.
While Indian engineers are a vital part of the
digital workforce, the country is still far away from
developing the cutting-edge capabilities needed to
manufacture Nvidia’s sophisticated chips. But In- Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets with Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, in New Delhi (ANI)
dia has ambitions to boost electronics manufactur-
ing as well as harness AI to buoy its digital economy. Ganesan, who was among those invited to Huang’s complex AI use cases that can drive significant
Huang and Nvidia saw signs of that potential meeting with AI researchers. business value across their entire value chain,”
during the trip. India’s largest conglomerate, Re- Also, Infosys, a global leader in next-genera- said Nandan Nilekani, Co-founder and Chairman,
liance, owned by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, an- tion digital services and consulting, and NVIDIA Infosys. “Infosys Topaz offerings and solutions are
nounced during Huang’s multi-city tour that its Jio have announced that they have expanded their complementary to Nvidia ‘s core stack. By com-
Platforms would build AI computing infrastruc- strategic collaboration with the aim to help en- bining our strengths and training 50,000 of our
ture for the country. The AI cloud will use end- terprises worldwide, drive productivity gains with workforce on Nvidia AI technology, we are creat-
to-end Nvidia supercomputing technologies, the generative AI applications and solutions. ing end-to-end industry leading AI solutions that
company said in a release. Reliance and another The broadened alliance will bring the Nvidia will help enterprises on their journey to become
large conglomerate, Tata, will also build and oper- AI Enterprise ecosystem of models, tools, runtimes AI-first.”
ate state-of-the-art AI supercomputing data cen- and GPU systems to Infosys Topaz – an AI-first set “Generative AI will drive the next wave of en-
ters and offer AI infrastructure as a service for use of services, solutions and platforms that acceler- terprise productivity gains,” said Jensen Huang,
by researchers, corporations and startups, Nvidia ate business value using generative AI technolo- Founder and CEO, Nvidia. “The Nvidia AI En-
said, without giving details or sharing timelines. gies. Through the integration, Infosys will create terprise ecosystem is ramping quickly to provide
India wants to catch up, but it faces challenges offerings customers can adopt, to easily integrate the platform for generative AI. Together, NVIDIA
turning itself into an AI hub. The country current- generative AI into their businesses. and Infosys will create an expert workforce to help
ly has no exascale compute capacity — being able Additionally, Infosys plans to set up an Nvidia businesses use this platform to build custom appli-
to handle a billion-billion calculations per second Centre of Excellence, where it will train and certify cations and solutions.”
— nor the ready AI talent capable of writing so- 50,000 of its employees on Nvidia AI technology to Infosys uses the full-stack Nvidia genera-
phisticated software, said Sashikumaar Ganesan, provide generative AI expertise to its vast network tive AI platform, including hardware and enter-
who chairs the computational and data sciences of customers across industries. prise-grade software to innovate across its busi-
department at Indian Institute of Science. “We “Infosys is transforming into an AI-first com- ness operations, and it is helping customers create
have to build not just AI infrastructure but also pany to better provide AI-based services to our generative AI applications for business operations,
high-performance computing workforce,” said clients worldwide. Our clients are also looking at sales and marketing.

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