- The mission will provide early-stage and growth-stage financing to new deep tech AI startups.
- A unified data platform is proposed for making non-personal data available to India’s startups and researchers.
The Union Cabinet has approved the India Artificial Intelligence Mission with a budget of ₹10,371.92 crore for the next five years. The mission aims to create computing infrastructure in public-private partnerships, with 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) to be made available to startups and a marketplace created for this purpose. AI compute will also be provided as a service to benefit research and development facilities and startups, enhancing the rapidly expanding AI startup and research ecosystem in India.
The mission will focus on developing the entire ecosystem, from compute power to models, applications, talent, data platforms, and regulatory frameworks. It follows the government’s approval of incentives for three chip units, with the goal of developing an AI chip in the next five years.
The mission aims to be a catalyst for India’s digital economy, fortifying the IndiaAI Startup Financing mechanism to provide streamlined access to funding for AI startups. It addresses the need for a GPU cluster for startups, which has been a long-standing demand due to the scarcity and high costs of such infrastructure.
The mission will provide early-stage and growth-stage financing to new deeptech AI startups and develop projects for safe and trusted AI, including tools and frameworks. A governance framework will also be developed for innovation.
Two to three India innovation centres will be established to develop large multimodal models and domain-specific foundational models. The mission will support the building of high-end scalable AI computing ecosystems and promote AI applications in critical sectors.
An India AI datasets platform is proposed to streamline non-personal data for AI innovation. This unified data platform will be a one-stop solution for making non-personal data available to India’s startups and researchers.
The India AI Application Development Initiative will focus on AI applications in critical sectors, with startups and researchers working on AI solutions for problem statements provided by the government and others.
Under the Skill Development Kaushal Vikas Yojana, training in AI will be provided at undergraduate, postgraduate, and PhD levels, with foundational AI courses made available in tier-2 and tier-3 cities and towns in remote areas.
