Nvidia, an American AI chip company, has been widening its collaboration in India, notably with venture capital firms, as it bets on the Indian AI ecosystem that has seen major investments in it by Big Tech.
In the statement on Wednesday, the company stated that it was partnering with various venture capital firms, such as Peak XV, Z47, Elevation Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, and Accel India, to discover and fund AI startups.
This is against the backdrop of venture capital investors increasingly taking an interest in the technology startups in India, with the Indian market in the initial public offering front offering high returns.
India is also hosting an AI summit, which has been attended by major tech CEOs and even the heads of state. Nvidia’s President and CEO Jensen Huang was also expected to attend it but withdrew due to “unforeseen circumstances.”
According to the chip designer, more than 4,000 Indian AI startups have already participated in Nvidia’s global startup program that assists tech startups to build, scale, and go to market.
The largest company in the world in terms of its market capitalization also indicated that it was working with government bodies and research institutes, and it was also continuing to develop domestic data centres in the country.
The initiatives of Nvidia are anchored in the “IndiaAI mission” of New Delhi, which seeks to enhance AI capacity in the country and allocate resources to the AI entrepreneurs there.
In a larger sense, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced ambitions of turning India into a tech powerhouse in the world. New Delhi has already given its nod to semiconductor projects worth $18 billion last September last year, in a bid to develop a domestic source of supply chain.
Nvidia has partnered with Indian cloud-computing companies like Yotta, Larsen and Toubro, E2E Networks, as well, to provide its AI chip clusters and assist in the construction of data centers in India.
A government official of New Delhi has been quoted as saying that the nation anticipates up to $200 billion in data center investments within the coming years. The Adani Power conglomerate of India has declared an investment of $100 billion in AI-ready and renewable energy-driven data centers.
Hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are all American tech companies that have already invested more than $50 billion into AI infrastructure and chips in the country.
Meanwhile, Nvidia claimed that it was additionally assisting India’s AI firms with its “NVIDIA Nemotron models,” a collection of Nvidia AI models that enterprises can access to create new chatbots, agents, and speech systems.
The Indian companies can use these Nvidia models to train new AI on India-specific data and language, which is in line with the national objective to build sovereign AI.
Sovereign AI is the level of a nation being able to develop its own artificial intelligence in accordance with its infrastructure, data, and business, such that more and more important AI systems will not rely on foreign providers.
