Reliance-NVIDIA to build AI supercomputers in India

US technology company NVIDIA and billionaire Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries on Friday announced a partnership to build AI supercomputers in India.

"The companies will work together to build AI infrastructure that is over an order of magnitude more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in India today," the firms said in a statement.

Days before the announcement, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday.

Starting operations in India in 2004, NVIDIA has four engineering development centres in the country - in Gurugram, Hyderabad, Pune and Bengaluru -with over 3,800 employees.

Its collaboration with Reliance will "develop India's own foundation large language model trained on the nation's diverse languages and tailored for generative AI applications to serve the world's most populous nation," the statement said.

NVIDIA will provide access to the most advanced GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service in the cloud.

GH200 marks a fundamental shift in computing architecture that provides exceptional performance and massive memory bandwidth.

"The NVIDIA-powered AI infrastructure is the foundation of the new frontier into AI for Reliance Jio Infocomm, Reliance Industries' telecom arm.

"The global AI revolution is transforming industries and daily life.

"To serve India's vast potential in AI, Reliance will create AI applications and services for their 450 million Jio customers and provide energy-efficient AI infrastructure to scientists, developers and startups across India," the statement said.

AI can help rural farmers interact via cell phones in their local language to get weather information and crop prices.

It can help provide, at massive scale, expert diagnosis of medical symptoms and imaging scans where doctors may not be immediately available.

AI can better predict cyclonic storms using decades of atmospheric data, enabling those at risk to evacuate and find shelter.

"The AI infrastructure will be hosted in AI-ready computing data centers that will eventually expand to 2,000 MW.

"Execution and implementation will be managed by Jio, which has extensive offerings and experience across mobile telephony, 5G spectrum, fiber networks and more," it said.

Huang said NVIDIA is "delighted to partner with Reliance to build state-of-the-art AI supercomputers in India."

"India has scale, data and talent. With the most advanced AI computing infrastructure, Reliance can build its own large language models that power generative AI applications made in India, for the people of India," he said.

Jio has broad expertise, infrastructure and engineering skill to roll out and manage the new AI computing infrastructure.

The collaboration with NVIDIA also aligns with its strategy of serving as a large, comprehensive digital, cloud and networking platform for both consumers and business customers.

"As India advances from a country of data proliferation to creating technology infrastructure for widespread and accelerated growth, computing and technology super centres like the one we envisage with NVIDIA will provide the catalytic growth just like Jio did to our nation's digital march," said Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries.

His son and chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm, Akash Ambani said Jio is committed to fuelling India's technology renaissance by democratizing access to cutting-edge technologies, and the collaboration with NVIDIA is a significant step in this direction.

"Together, we will develop a state-of-the-art AI cloud infrastructure that is secure, sustainable and deeply relevant across India, accelerating the nation's journey towards becoming an AI powerhouse," he added.