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Nvidia Expands Footprint in India with New Partnerships and Hindi Language Model
Nvidia recently unveiled a series of strategic collaborations with prominent Indian companies during its AI Summit held in Mumbai. The event, which featured notable personalities including Bollywood icon Akshay Kumar and Mukesh Ambani, India’s wealthiest individual and head of Reliance Industries, underscored the company’s commitment to enhancing its presence in one of the world’s largest technology markets.
Among the key announcements was a partnership with Reliance to establish AI infrastructure throughout India. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, emphasized the importance of this initiative, stating that the company is also collaborating with firms like Yotta and Tata Communications to bolster the nation’s computing capabilities. Huang projected that by the end of the year, India’s computing power would increase significantly, claiming that the country will possess “20 times more compute” compared to just over a year ago.
“India used to be a country that produced software and primarily exported it. In the future, India is poised to export AI technologies,” Huang remarked, highlighting a shift towards a more robust AI development ecosystem.
In addition to partnerships, Nvidia introduced the Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi 4B, a compact language model tailored for Hindi, which is the most widely spoken language in India. This model will be available for companies utilizing Nvidia’s hardware. Moreover, Indian IT consultancy Tech Mahindra has plans to leverage this technology to develop its Hindi AI model called Project Indus 2.0.
Unlike expansive language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, small language models like Nemotron are designed to be more efficient, trained on tighter and specifically curated datasets.
Nvidia is also partnering with major Indian IT firms such as Infosys, Wipro, and TCS to equip around 500,000 developers with the skills necessary to create and implement AI solutions using Nvidia’s technologies.
This enhanced focus on the Indian market comes at a time when Nvidia seeks to explore new regions for business growth, especially as the rapid expansion it has experienced recently begins to stabilize.
On the national level, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is actively working to attract significant foreign investment in technology sectors, particularly in semiconductors, to strengthen India’s economic framework. The aim is for India to establish a competitive edge in semiconductor manufacturing, with an ambitious goal of growing its electronics sector from approximately $155 billion to $500 billion by the year 2030.
“India is critically important to the global computing industry and is central to the IT landscape,” Huang observed during the event.
The inclusion of Ambani in the discussions further spotlighted Reliance’s ambition to lead in the AI domain within India. Reliance Jio, which emerged as a telecommunications powerhouse less than ten years ago, has become the foremost mobile service provider in the country.
“Jio is set to enhance AI infrastructure on a large scale, aiming to democratize AI by utilizing data generated from nearly a billion internet users in the coming years. With planned investments and expansion, Jio seeks to champion AI adoption across various sectors, from consumers to enterprises and government entities,” noted Neil Shah, a partner at Counterpoint Research. He indicated that this presents significant opportunities for Nvidia and other companies operating in the region.
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