India on Thursday outlined global AI ambitions with plans to build its own ‘foundational model’ that could take on the might of ChatGPT, Deepseek R1 and others, as it lined up “most affordable” common compute facility powered by 18,693 GPUs to be used by startups and researchers.India’s bold move comes at a time when Chinese company DeepSeek has turned heads after its AI model overtook ChatGPT as the top-ranked free app on Apple’s appstore, challenging the AI dominance concentrated so far with the US firms, particularly Silicon Valley frontrunner Open AI.
IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw exuded confidence that India will build a foundational model that is world-class, and that it will be able to compete with best models across the globe.
On Thursday, New Delhi announced the next steps in its AI blueprint, among them, 18,693 Graphics Processing Unit or GPUs on offer by the empanelled bidders (a list that includes Jio Platforms, CMS Computers, Tata Communications, E2E Networks, Yotta Data Services, and others), and start of AI safety institution, with 8 projects approved under it.
The government is also calling for proposals to develop India’s own foundational models that would be aligned to Indian context, Indian languages, culture, basically where datasets are “for our country, of our country and for our citizens” and “biases are removed”.