Indian Government to Launch GPU Access Portal Amid Rising AI Competition with China

The government is going to host Open Source model like Deepseek on Indian servers soon said Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Thursday. "We are going to do this very soon. Already, the team has worked the details the servers are required? how much capacity is required? All those details have been worked out. We will very soon be hosting those open source models on Indian servers," says Vaishnaw.

This comes at a time when Chinese startup DeepSeek with their open source reasoning model R1 has challenged the narrative that entitles need access to large amounts of GPU for building frontier models.

The Indian government is working on the portal from which startups and researchers can access GPUs. Through this portal, startups and researchers can access the highly valued GPUs necessary for training AI models at much lower prices.

The Union Minister further added that the government will be giving 40 percent subsidy to the student on common compute facility so the cost to student will come down below Rs 100/hour. He highlighted that India has roughly 10,000 GPUs are ready in India, out of 18000 GPUs. He said out of 18693 GPUs, total 15000 High end GPUs has come in entire process.

As per the Union Minister DeepSeek was trained with more than 2000 GPUs, while the Chat GPT version was was trained with about 25000 GPUs. The technical partners who wanted to participate in this (AI) mission, they have started working, and investing.

"Our focus will be on utilising the power of AI for solving population scale problems. That is a very important focus. And in that we had said that a major pillar of the India AI mission will be to have series of applications which are useful for our people, healthcare, education, Agriculture, logistics, weather forecasting, flood forecasting, snow forecasting, Glacier measurement which are effecting karhe number of people," the Minister said.

The Union government will provide subsidy on artificial intelligence (AI) compute power for the next four years.

"In its currently approved form we'll be able to provide subsidy for 4 years... it's a very sustainable period and we believe that as we have more empowerments. The prices will actually go down significantly below what they have already come," The Union Minister said in a press conference.

The move aims to make cutting-edge technology accessible to students, researchers, startups, and academic institutions across the country.

As part of the vision of 'Making AI in India' and 'Making AI Work for India,' the Union Cabinet has already approved the comprehensive national-level India Artificial Intelligence mission with a budget outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore in March last year.