Nvidia inks partnerships with TechM, Infy, Gnani.ai, others during AI Summit 24

New Delhi: Chipmaking giant Nvidia has inked several strategic partnerships with Indian enterprises, signalling its commitment to harnessing India's vast potential in artificial intelligence (AI) and data ecosystem.

The announcements came during the Nvidia AI Summit 2024 in Mumbai, where its founder and CEO Jensen Huang articulated a vision for India's future as a global AI leader.

Huang characterised the current technological landscape as experiencing a "seismic change" driven by AI innovations. He highlighted that India, long recognised as a software export hub, is on the brink of becoming a powerhouse in AI exports.

Among the key partnerships announced, Nvidia will collaborate with Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries to develop an advanced AI computing infrastructure and establish an innovation centre.

Nvidia will supply its Blackwell AI processors for Reliance's data centres and provide Hopper AI chips to major data centres operated by companies like Yotta Data Services and Tata Communications.

Additionally, Nvidia is launching a Center of Excellence (CoE) in partnership with Tech Mahindra, aimed at advancing sovereign large language model (LLM) frameworks, agentic AI and physical AI.

This CoE will be situated within Tech Mahindra’s Makers Lab in Pune and Hyderabad, utilising the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform to deliver tailored and enterprise-grade AI applications that empower clients to integrate agentic AI into their operations.

"India produced and exported software," Huang said. "In the future, India will export AI".

"India is very, very dear to the world's computer industry, central to the IT industry, at the centre and core of the IT of just about every single company in the world.

"Nvidia's ecosystem in India is very rich; 2024 will see a 20 times growth in compute capacities in India," he said.

In another significant development, Hanooman AI has introduced Everest 1.0, India’s own generative AI foundational model built on Nvidia's latest GPUs. This versatile model supports 35 languages, with plans to expand to 90 languages soon, and can perform various tasks, including text generation, image creation, code writing, voice generation, and document analysis.

IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has also extended its collaboration with Nvidia to launch industry-specific solutions designed to accelerate AI adoption.

TCS emphasised that these "curated AI journeys" merge deep domain expertise with advanced technology, enabling faster realisation of value for clients.

Voice-first Gen-AI firm Gnani.ai has launched a speech-to-speech large language model powered by Nvidia's AI-accelerated computing platform.

This innovative model can manage over 10 million voice interactions daily.

"The speech-to-speech LLM is transforming the way enterprises handle their most critical customer interactions. By combining Nvidia accelerated computing with our conversational AI expertise, we are helping businesses achieve scale and efficiency with a business impact of over USD 6 billion, and that is truly revolutionary," said Ganesh Gopalan, CEO of Gnani.ai.

Infosys also announced the launch of its small language models -- Infosys Topaz BankingSLM and Infosys Topaz ITOpsSLM -- built on the powerful Nvidia AI Stack.

Developed as part of the Infosys Centre of Excellence for Nvidia technology, the models are intended to assist companies in swiftly implementing and expanding AI.

Chennai-based Zoho Corp has partnered with Nvidia to integrate large language models into its SaaS applications, making these advanced tools accessible to over 7,00,000 customers worldwide.

"Over the past year, the company has invested more than USD 10 million in Nvidia's AI technology and GPUs, and plans to invest an additional USD 10 million in the coming year," the company announced during the summit.

Among the firsts for cloud services in India, E2E Networks has announced its partnership with Nvidia to introduce NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs to the Indian market.

"You have the critical ingredients here in your country to be able to harvest the raw data and transform it into intelligence. You can code it into a model and manufacture your own digital intelligence and export that," Huang told reporters.

Huang, who is widely credited for seeing the future and pivoting his company to take advantage of the AI revolution, stressed that India doing this urgently given the capabilities it has and added that he can't wait to see India manufacture "AI at scale".

He also advised Indian companies to prioritise AI over chip manufacturing as well, which has seen some activity with investments announced lately.

"Before you follow other countries into manufacturing, India should jump into this future AI factory...there's a new manufacturing industry, don't wait to jump into this one. Don't enter this 20 years later. Enter this one at ground zero," Huang said.

Huang said a third of Nvidia's employee base is in India, which includes engineering teams in Pune, Gurugram and Hyderabad, helping company-wide efforts at chip design, pointing out that India is already home to a lot of intellectual capital.