India backs Bengaluru startup Sarvam with 40,000 GPUs to build the country’s first sovereign LLM, marking a major electronics infrastructure boost for AI.
India is accelerating its electronics infrastructure push with a record 40,000 GPUs being empanelled under the IndiaAI Mission, setting the stage for the country’s first large language model (LLM).
Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam is slated to roll out India’s first LLM by early next year. It is also the first startup selected to build India’s foundational AI model under the government-backed initiative.
The Centre has scaled GPU access fourfold from its original target of 10,000 units, ensuring developers, students, and startups gain access to unprecedented computing capacity. Of the total, 34,000 GPUs are already empanelled while another 6,000 are in process. Sarvam has secured a record 4,096 NVIDIA H100 SXM GPUs, among the most advanced in the world, to drive its LLM efforts.
The IndiaAI Mission, supported by a ₹10,000 crore fund, is designed to create a sovereign AI ecosystem. So far, ₹111 crore has been disbursed in GPU subsidies to accelerate adoption and model training.
Highlighting Sarvam’s lead role, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, said: “One of them, most probably Sarvam, will be the first to come off the mark with a reasonably sized, well-trained, Indian language-trained model, with data that is not having the bias of many other models.”
On the government’s scaling of GPU infrastructure, he added: “Against a 10,000 target, 34,000 GPUs are already empanelled, and another 6,000 are in process. That means 40,000 GPUs we are able to provide to our development community.”
With cutting-edge semiconductor hardware (GPUs) forming the backbone of AI research and training, India is strengthening its claim to digital sovereignty while positioning Sarvam as the frontrunner in its sovereign AI journey.
