Reliance Jio has partnered with the American GPU giant, Nvidia to set up cloud-based AI infrastructure in India. The announcement on Friday came after Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) Chairman Mukesh Ambani announced in the Annual General Meeting held in August that Reliance Industries will be investing in creating computing capacity of AI applications in India.
The partnership with Nvidia could also lead to the development of a homegrown large-language model. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, hinted, “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.”
Read: Portfolio podcast: Nvidia and the AI gold rush
At present, India is decades behind pioneers in LLM like Open AI, Google etc. While certain IT giants like Tech Mahindra and Zoho, have announced their plans to create generative AI platforms, investments into these projects are minuscule in comparison to the large American companies.
For the most part, the press release hinted at Reliance hosting the cloud infrastructure for AI applications in India. During the AGM, Mukesh Ambani committed to build at least 2000 MW of capacity for AI applications.
“The new AI cloud infrastructure will enable researchers, developers, startups, scientists, AI practitioners, and others across India to access accelerated computing and high-speed, secure cloud networking to run workloads safely and with extreme energy efficiency.,” the press release said,
As part of the collaboration, Nvidia will provide Jio with end-to-end AI supercomputer technologies including CPU, GPU, networking, and AI operating systems and frameworks for building the most advanced AI models. Jio will manage and maintain the AI cloud infrastructure and oversee customer engagement and access.
Read: 93% of engineers seek upskilling in AI, cloud computing: Report
Mukesh Ambani, said on the partnership, “As India advances from a country of data proliferation to creating technology infrastructure for widespread and accelerated growth, computing and technology super centres like the one we envisage with Nvidia will provide the catalytic growth just like Jio did to our nation’s digital march. “ He added that he is delighted with the partnership with Nvidia and looks forward to a purposeful journey together.