New Delhi: The Union Cabinet on Thursday evening approved an outlay of Rs 10,372 crore for five years for the India AI Mission, aimed at fostering innovation in artificial intelligence through public-private partnerships.
Under the India AI Mission, a key focus area is to develop high-end compute capacity within the country, for which the government will facilitate the setting up of more than 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) under the public-private partnership (PPP) model.
Additionally, an AI marketplace will be created to offer AI-as-a-service and pre-trained models to innovators.
Of the total outlay around Rs 4,500 crore would be used for building compute infrastructure and close to Rs 2,000 crore has been earmarked for financing deep-tech startups.
The India AI mission aims to develop foundational models with a capacity of more than 100 billion parameters. These models will be trained on datasets covering major Indian languages for priority sectors such as health care, agriculture, and governance. AI curation units (ACUs) will also be developed in 50-line ministries.
The mission will also focus on accelerating deep-tech AI startups. For skilling and talent development, the mission will work towards increasing AI courses at undergraduate, master’s, and PhD levels.
It will be implemented by an ‘IndiaAI’ Independent Business Division (IBD) under the Digital India Corporation (DIC). This division will also provide early-stage financing to deep-tech AI startups.
As part of the programme, the government plans to set up an India AI datasets platform to streamline the use of non-personal data by different stakeholders within the country. “The unified data platform will serve as a one-stop solution for accessing non-personal data,” Goyal said.
To promote the development and deployment of indigenous large multimodal models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models in critical sectors, the government has proposed the establishment of up to three India AI innovation centres.
An IndiaAI Application Development Initiative will also be launched as part of the programme. This initiative will promote the development of AI applications in critical sectors, addressing problem statements sourced from central ministries, state departments, and other institutions, the minister said.
Following the announcement, Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar in a post on X said: “I am grateful to the Hon’ble PM for approving more than Rs 10,000 crore for the India AI programme. This will catalyse India’s AI ecosystem.”
Under this mission, data and AI labs will be established in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities across India to provide foundational-level courses.
