Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia Corp., is forming key partnerships with some of India's largest corporations, including Reliance Industries Ltd. and Infosys Ltd., highlighting the critical role the world's most populous nation will play in the AI leader's future. At an AI summit in Mumbai, Nvidia emphasized how Indian companies across various sectors are leveraging its AI technology to enhance their products and services. Huang is also set to discuss AI's potential in India with Mukesh Ambani, the retail-to-refining tycoon, during the event.
India has emerged as a potentially major AI arena, with the country of 1.4 billion adopting the technology in industries including agriculture, education and manufacturing to boost efficiency. While still a small part of their revenue, global tech companies from Nvidia to Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. are betting on the rapidly-growing economy as a growth market and operations base.
Nvidia said it’ll help India’s Tech Mahindra Ltd. to build a Hindi large language model, and work with e-commerce company Flipkart on its conversational customer-service systems. It’ll also collaborate with India’s health-care companies to help them improve productivity in patient care and research.
The US company has emerged at the forefront of a global AI boom, supplying the chips tech leaders like Microsoft and Google use to develop artificial intelligence. Huang has toured the globe this year, pushing countries and enterprises to adopt AI technologies he’s dubbed a “new industrial revolution.”
Nvidia began its operations in Bangalore, southern India, two decades ago and also has development centers in three other cities in the country, with a total of about 4,000 engineers, its largest employee base after its home country.
About a year ago, it struck pacts to build AI data centers with local conglomerates including Ambani’s Reliance Group and the Tata Group. Reliance Industries is building a range of AI tools and applications called JioBrain, Ambani said at the company’s live-streamed shareholders meeting in August, during which he mentioned the term AI at least 80 times.
India has gained increasing importance for global tech companies as tensions between the U.S. and China have intensified. Nvidia is one of the companies affected by Washington’s restrictions on business with China. After meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the U.S. last month, CEO Jensen Huang referred to this as 'India's moment.'
Although India has a rapidly growing digital economy, its AI infrastructure is still in its early stages. The government has allocated $1.2 billion through the IndiaAI Mission to develop data centers essential for building AI systems and commercializing new technologies.