India is set to join the global artificial intelligence race and release a generative AI model sometime in 2025, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told reporters gathered at the Utkarsh Odisha Conclave.
According to the Economic Times of India, the country has acquired 18,693 GPUs, including 12,896 Nvidia H100s, and is also looking at $20 billion in foreign investment in data centers over the next three years.
The minister provided a timeframe for India’s homegrown generative AI model that will be custom-tailored for the country’s many languages and cultures:
“We believe that there are at least six major developers who can develop AI models in the next six to eight months on the outer limit, and four to six months on a more optimistic estimate.”
Vaishnaw’s announcement comes on the heels of the release of DeepSeek R1, an open-source AI model that performs on par with leading models from OpenAI yet reportedly only needed a fraction of the cost to train.
Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw addressing the media on AI. Source: CNBC
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The AI race heats up
The release of DeepSeek R1 upended many long-held assumptions about artificial intelligence, including that scaling was a linear process that requires huge amounts of computing power.
In response to the DeepSeek reveal, US President Donald Trump is considering tightening export restrictions on high-performance AI chips produced by leading AI chip maker Nvidia.
The US government has already placed three major export controls on Nvidia sales to China, including an embargo on the H100 AI processor in 2022 and a ban on semiconductor component sales in 2023.
Modified AI chips that featured degraded performance to stay compliant with the initial US sanctions on AI component sales to China, like Nvidia's A800 and H800, were also banned under the expanded restrictions.
President Trump speaking at the Davos summit. Source: The White House
Trump has vowed to make the US the AI capital of the world and continue the country’s dominance in the semiconductor and high-performance computing sectors.
The US president recently announced project “Stargate,” a $500 billion initiative led by OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank to develop AI infrastructure in the United States.
However, critics say tighter controls over US companies will make the country less competitive on the global stage and will erode its leadership in AI as smaller and more nimble competitors enter the field.
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