Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio, along with AWS, NTT and Yotta, are included in the list of companies for the INDIAai mission, which has a budget of Rs 10,371.92 crore.
Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani is a vehement proponent of boosting India’s capabilities in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) space and building AI infrastructure in the country. Recently the Narendra Modi cabinet at the Centre approved the INDIAai mission, which aims to “build a comprehensive ecosystem that fosters AI innovation by democratizing computing access, enhancing data quality, developing indigenous AI capabilities, attracting top AI talent, enabling industry collaboration, providing startup risk capital, ensuring socially impactful AI projects, and promoting ethical AI.”
According to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the INDIAai mission has been divided into seven main stages, and several major cloud service providers, including Jio Cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Japan’s NTT, have been named in the list of providers.
“We have received very good response from the industry. The demand for interfacing is more now than the training model. Request for proposal has been made by more than 30 companies. They are data center players, hyper scaler-global and Indian IT majors are also included,” said MeitY Additional Secretary Abhishek Singh.
Singh revealed that Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio, along with AWS, NTT and Yotta, are included in the list of companies for the INDIAai mission, which has a budget of Rs 10,371.92 crore.
According to an Economic Times (ET) report, the INDIAai mission is in its final stages and government may green-light the project by the end of the year. Mukesh Ambani’s son, Akash Ambani, who heads Jio, is said to be heavily involved in AI project.
Notably, in October, in a major step to develop India’s AI capabilities, Mukesh Ambani- led Reliance and American chipmaker, NVIDIA announced a partnership to build cutting-edge AI infrastructure in the country. The decision was announced by NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang at the NVIDIA AI Summit 2024 in Mumbai.
“In order to lead an artificial intelligence, you need to have AI model technology that India has, you need to have data and the last thing you need to have is AI infrastructure and we are announcing that Reliance and NVIDIA are partnering to build AI infrastructure here in India. In order to create that in the flywheel is one of the greatest advantages that India has which is a very large population of users,” Huang had said while announcing the Reliance-NVIDIA partnership.