During a five-day trip to India in early September, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited four cities, had dinner with technology executives and researchers, and had one-on-one conversations with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the field of artificial intelligence (AI). For Nvidia, whose graphics processing units (GPUs) are crucial to the development of artificial intelligence systems, this South Asian country with a population of 1.4 billion provides a rare opportunity. As the United States increasingly restricts exports of high-end chips to China and the world seeks alternative electronics manufacturing bases,India could become a source of AI talent, a chip production base and a market for Nvidia products.
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At a meeting with top researchers in Delhi, Huang talked about reskilling the country's vast workforce and leveraging India's data and talent to build future artificial intelligence models, according to multiple attendees. Huang also told an executive in India's tech hub Bangalore that he has great faith in the country's engineering talent, especially graduates from top engineering schools the Indian Institutes of Technology. Huang added: "This will become one of the largest artificial intelligence markets in the world."
Nvidia and India share a common interest in betting on and accelerating the rise of artificial intelligence in the country. The chipmaker is unable to sell high-end chips to China, a market that accounts for a fifth of Nvidia's sales. Neil Shah, vice president of technology market research at Counterpoint, said: "India is the only market left, so it is not surprising that Nvidia wants to put multiple eggs in this basket."
While Indian engineers are an important part of the digital workforce, the country is still far from developing the cutting-edge capabilities needed to manufacture Nvidia's complex chips. India has ambitions to develop electronics manufacturing and use artificial intelligence to boost its digital economy. India is pouring billions of dollars in subsidies to build chip manufacturing infrastructure to attract companies such as Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang saw signs of “rich potential that India will offer in the field of artificial intelligence” during the trip.Indian company Reliance's artificial intelligence cloud will use end-to-end Nvidia supercomputing technology. Reliance and Tata will also build and operate a state-of-the-art AI supercomputing data center and provide AI infrastructure as a service (IasS) for use by researchers, enterprises and startups, Nvidia said, without disclosing details or timelines.
India is attracting Apple and Amazon to contract manufacturing of electronic productsMoving out of Chinaachieved some success, such as"Made in India" iPhone 15 has been launched on the launch day. Now India will turn to semiconductors, having previously only had some chip design experience but no semiconductor foundries.
India wants to catch up, but faces the challenge of transforming itself into an AI hub.Sashikumaar Ganesan, head of the department of computing and data science at the Indian Institute of Science, said the country currently does not have exascale computing capabilities (capable of processing one billion calculations per second), nor does it have ready artificial intelligence talent capable of writing complex software. “We need to build not only the AI infrastructure but also the high-performance computing workforce.”
K.Krishna Moorthy, CEO of the Electronics and Semiconductor Association of India trade organization, said,India remains a rapidly maturing high-end technology market. This creates huge demand for Nvidia's GPUs. "As India's digital economy develops and the government requires data security, data privacy and data localization, this may require more than 100,000 GPUs to build AI cloud infrastructure."
Nvidia currently has four engineering centers in India, including Bangalore and the Gurgaon suburb of Delhi, with a total of 4,000 engineers. During his visit, Huang held town hall meetings at each location to emphasize the importance of remaining competitive in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence market.