Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang visited four cities on a five-day tour of India earlier this month, dined with tech leaders and researchers, snapped a lot of selfies, and had a one-on-one discussion about the AI industry with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Huang admitted to surviving entire workdays on spicy masala omelets and cold coffees due to his packed itinerary for India.
Despite being greeted like a head of state, Huang’s trip was entirely for business. For Nvidia, the 1.4 billion-person South Asian country offers a unique opportunity, since its graphics processors are essential to the creation of artificial intelligence systems. In light of the US’s growing restrictions on high-end chip exports to China and the global search for a substitute electronics manufacturing hub, India may develop into a hub for AI expertise, a location for chip manufacture, and a market for Nvidia’s goods.
Several attendees said that Huang discussed retraining large portions of the Indian workforce and using Indian expertise and data to construct future AI models at a meeting with top researchers in Delhi. Huang expressed his belief in the country’s engineering expertise, especially that of Indian Institutes of Technology grads, to an executive in Bangalore, the tech powerhouse of India.
Huang stated, “You have the talent, you have the data,” during a Bangalore press conference. “This is going to be one of the largest AI markets in the world,” Huang continued.
India and Nvidia have a mutual interest in accelerating and wagering on the nation’s AI triumph. A fifth of Nvidia’s sales come from China, where chipmakers are unable to supply high-end microprocessors due to concerns that the chips may be used for cyberwarfare or the development of autonomous weapons. Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, stated that Nvidia wants to place several eggs in that basket because India is the only market that is still open.
Even if Indian engineers make up a significant portion of the digital labor force, the nation is still a long way from achieving the state-of-the-art capabilities required to produce the complex chips made by Nvidia. However, India wants to grow its digital economy by using AI to support electronics production. The country is spending billions in subsidies to develop up chip manufacturing infrastructure to lure the likes of Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp.
Nandan Nilekani, the chairman of Infosys Ltd. and a key architect of most of the nation’s enormous digital public infrastructure, stated, “India is strategic to Nvidia’s future.” Both the government and major business companies are constructing AI infrastructure at a rapid pace. Nilekani, who had dinner with the chip magnate during the tour, remarked, “That’s good news for Huang.”
Despite the oppressive summer temperatures of over ninety degrees, the Taiwanese-American millionaire braved the heat to arrive at the prime minister’s residence in Delhi wearing his signature black leather jacket. The two discussed “the rich potential India offers in the world of AI,” according to information later released by Modi.
During the tour, Huang and Nvidia noticed indications of such potential. During Huang’s multi-city tour, Reliance, the largest conglomerate in India and the property of billionaire Mukesh Ambani, declared that its Jio Platforms would construct AI computing infrastructure for the nation. The company released a statement stating that the AI cloud will make use of end-to-end Nvidia supercomputing technologies. Without providing specifics or a timeframe, Nvidia stated that Reliance and another sizable conglomerate, Tata, will also construct and run cutting-edge AI supercomputing data centers and provide AI infrastructure as a service for usage by academics, businesses, and startups.
Giants Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have been persuaded by India to move their contract electronics production from China, and this month Apple will sell iPhone 15 smartphones built in India on launch day. With some expertise in chip design and no prior experience with semiconductor foundries, it is now focusing on semiconductors. Modern chips, such as those created by Nvidia, are produced almost exclusively in Taiwan. The nation spent billions of dollars over several decades to get to its current manufacturing levels of competence.
India is trying to catch up, but it has obstacles in its way of becoming a centre for AI. Currently, the nation lacks both the ready AI talent capable of writing complex software and exascale compute capacity, which can process one billion calculations per second, according to Sashikumaar Ganesan, the chair of the computational and data sciences department at the Indian Institute of Science. In addition to building AI infrastructure, Ganesan—who was invited to Huang’s meeting with AI researchers—said, “We have to build a high-performance computing workforce.”
Nevertheless, according to K. Krishna Moorthy, CEO of trade association India Electronics and Semiconductor Association, India has a rapidly developing market for high-end products. The demand for Nvidia’s GPUs, or graphics processing units, has skyrocketed as a result. According to Moorthy, “the government is mandating data security, privacy, and localization as India’s digital economy grows, and this could require over 100,000 GPUs to build AI cloud infrastructure.”
Telecom behemoths in the nation, such as Reliance’s Jio, gather billions of data points per day from its 500 million shops and half a billion mobile customers. According to Moorthy, “the data created by 1.4 billion Indians could position the nation for the next stage of digital growth.” “Huang is aware that this is where the growth for chips that enable AI will occur in the future.”
With four engineering centers already established in India—Bangalore and the Delhi suburb of Gurgaon, among others—Nvidia boasts the second-largest talent pool in the world, after the United States. Huang hosted town hall meetings while traveling, emphasizing the value of staying competitive in a fast changing AI sector. Speaking to the staff, he restated a statement he had made in public previously, putting his own spin on the proverb “either you are running for food or you are running away from being food.”
