The $27.5-billion company, which is the world’s best-known maker of hardware and software for AI tools, also said it will partner with the salt-to-software conglomerate Tata Group to advance AI infrastructure in India.
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The co-created LLM, which is the bedrock of all generative AI models such as ChatGPT, will be eventually owned by Reliance, Huang said. “They (Reliance) can create AI models, services and applications for their 450 million (customers),” he added.
Meanwhile, the partnership with the Tata Group’s Tata Consultancy Services, Tata Motors and Tata Communications is aimed at building “AI infrastructure that is over an order of magnitude more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in India today”, Huang told reporters in Bengaluru while unveiling the two big-ticket partnerships.
“India really needs to accelerate its infrastructure building. We would like to do it almost immediately, the best we (Nvidia) can do is probably create supercomputers that are an order of magnitude 100 times faster than the fastest supercomputer in all of India today. By the end of next year, (India) will have very large computers,” said the 60-year-old Nvidia founder who is on a week-long visit to India, which included a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday.
Noting that “Reliance with 450 million customers has more customers and access to data than any company on the planet (and) they support probably all 22 languages and 2,500 dialects of the country”, Huang said that Nvidia will help co-create AI solutions for Reliance using this data.
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In a statement on Friday, Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, said that “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”.Pointing to the advancements that have “made focus on AI a central priority in governments, industries and society at large”, N Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, said “the impact of AI and machine learning is going to be profound across industries and every aspect of our lives”.
The Tata Group’s partnership with Nvidia will “democratise access to AI infrastructure, accelerate build-out of AI solutions and enable upgradation of AI talent at scale”, he said in a statement.
Nvidia will provide access to the most advanced Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and Nvidia DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service in the cloud. GH200 provides massive memory bandwidth.
The American technology company is also likely to forge partnerships with software giants Infosys and Wipro in the future. The chipmaker, which is riding on a trillion-dollar valuation led by the boom in generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), expects to leverage the vast data generated by India’s $1.4 billion population to build AI products that can be exported from here, ET had reported on Friday.
AI infrastructure
The partnership with the Tatas is focused on building AI infrastructure in India. “If the infrastructure is available in India, more companies can be founded here,” said Huang, pointing out that currently firms are forced to look for infrastructure abroad.
“TCS has 600,000 IT professionals, we’re going to reskill them for AI; instead of developing business operations applications in the back room, they will be creating AI applications for the front office,” he added.
Noting that Tata Motors is one of the largest car companies in the world, Huang said that “in future Tata Motors will be digitalised”. “From the beginning to the end, from the design, styling, engineering, simulation testing, all the way to the autonomous vehicle capabilities that they want to deploy, AI will be part of that entire thing from beginning to end,” he said.
“One of the most obvious places of AI in Tata Motors is a brand called JLR (Jaguar Land Rover), autonomous vehicles using AI for autonomous driving, lane keeping and automatic emergency braking,” he said.
Commenting on the partnership, Jio Platforms said the new infrastructure will greatly speed up a wide range of India’s key initiatives and AI projects, including AI chatbots, drug discovery, climate research and more.
While Nvidia will provide 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, the company stated.
Akash Ambani, chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, said, “Together, we will develop a state-of-the-art AI cloud infrastructure that is secure, sustainable and deeply relevant across India, accelerating the nation’s journey towards becoming an AI powerhouse.”
On the question whether there was any conversation around Nvidia manufacturing chips in India, Huang said it was premature right now.
“Not yet, because it’s still going to take some time to build the fabs and the process and technology we use is more advanced at the moment. But time will come. It’s just a little too early right now,” he said.
We collaborate with the government on many fronts today because the scientific computing centres are government subsidised and many of the university programmes are government subsidised, he said.
“You have one of the most extensive societal digital platforms in the world. The India Stack is pretty unbelievable stuff. And so any computing that wants to be done in India would probably have to involve working with the government. I think it’s terrific,” he said.
He also said that he spent a significant time interacting with startups in India. “We are working with 15,000 AI startups in the world. I wouldn’t be surprised if 150 or so are here in India,” Huang said.
Expanding on the partnership with Reliance, Huang said that Nvidia will contribute with its AI software, AI model expertise, large language model expertise, and will work together on creating an AI. “When that AI is done, it belongs to Reliance. And the reason for that is because even though we contribute a lot of technology, the data comes from Reliance, the learning comes from Reliance. In the end, it’s really only useful at Reliance. They will keep it, they’ll own it, they’ll operate,” he said.
But in the case of Tata, it’s for enterprise. “TCS is an enterprise services company, and they will go and help the world’s enterprise companies create business applications. And so these business applications can be for the legal, HR, sales or marketing department,” he said.
TCS services close to 1,000 companies all around the world, Huang said. “You still have Infosys, and Wipro”, he said, hinting at possible scope for partnership in the future.
