AI: Nvidia covering all AI bases in India. RTZ #520

...AI opportunities in India remain large from small beginnings

As I’ve long recounted, Nvidia’s founder/CEO Jensen Huang has been relentlessly focused on executing on the company wide swathe of opportunities globally in this AI Tech Wave. India has long been an Nvidia priority.

One of the key areas of focus for Jensen, has been opportunities around the ‘Sovereign AI’ bucket. This is where countries around the world are racing to focus both public and private efforts to make sure they’re executing in LLM AI opportunities within their borders. It’s a revenue line already worth tens of billions to Nvidia, and they continue to be focused here.

India is one of those critical markets, as I’ve discussed several times in previous posts. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang is is again in India this week as Reuters explains in “Nvidia to supply chips to Reliance, other Indian companies in AI push”:

“Nvidia will supply artificial intelligence processors to Indian companies such as Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Industries, the chip giant said on Thursday, as it deepens partnerships to exploit a growing market.”

“The U.S. company will supply its Blackwell AI processors for a one-gigawatt data centre Reliance is building in the western state of Gujarat, Chief Executive Jensen Huang and Ambani told an AI summit in the business capital of Mumbai.”

Nvidia is spreading its API GPU and infrastructure allocations across the ‘usual suspects’ of key Indian big tech companies:

“Nvidia said it also plans to supply tens of thousands of its Hopper AI chips to build large-scale data centres, in an expansion led by firms such as data centre provider Yotta Data Services and Tata Communications.”

"In the future, India is going to be the country that will export AI," Huang said, by contrast with its role in software exports. "You have the fundamental ingredients - AI, data and AI infrastructure, and you have a large population of users."

Jensen has been focused on India for a while, from the top down.

“From large companies to startups, businesses in India have focused on building AI models based on its array of languages to grow consumer appeal and drive activities such as customer service AI assistants and content translation.”

“With more than 1.4 billion people and low-cost internet access, the South Asian nation is also a key growth market for U.S. technology giants.”

“Nvidia said Indian IT services firm Tech Mahindra is the first to use its new Hindi-language AI model to develop a custom AI model called Indus 2.0, focused on the language widely spoken nationwide, and its dozens of dialects.”

“Besides Tech Mahindra, Nvidia is partnering with IT giants such as Infosys (INFY.NS), opens new tab, TCS (TCS.NS), opens new tab and Wipro (WIPR.NS), opens new tab, to train about half a million developers to design and deploy AI agents using its software.”

“Reliance and Ola Electric were among the companies set to use Nvidia's "Omniverse" simulation technology, to test factory plans in a virtual world.”

It’s important to note that Jensen seems to be covering all his bases in India, across its various key tech constitutents, while keeping in mind the longer term opportunity relative to where India is in AI today. And leveraging his global celebrity in the process:

“Huang talked up India's AI prospects at the Nvidia event that managers said was delayed by a large crowd which flocked to catch a glimpse of the leather jacket-clad boss of the three-trillion-dollar chip firm.”

“"India is already world-class in designing chips, India already develops AI," Huang said. "Instead of being an outsourcer and a back office, India will become an exporter of AI."

“The Hindi-language AI model launched on Thursday builds on Huang's view that every country needs to produce AI using its own infrastructure, data and workforce to ensure it is inclusive.”

That is the ‘Sovereign AI’ narrative Jensen has been tactically executing in so many national markets of late. India is the latest example of this execution. And it’s a place where Nvidia has invested its resources early:

“After first setting up shop nearly two decades ago, Nvidia has engineering and design centers in India, as well as offices in key cities such as the tech hub of Bengaluru and neighbouring Hyderabad.”

“In September last year, Reliance and Nvidia vowed to develop AI supercomputers in India and build large language models trained on its languages. Later that year, Nvidia unveiled a similar partnership with Tata Group.”

In many of these countries, the governments have also chipped in to accelerate their AI investments. Again, India here is no exception:

“India's ambitions in AI, including the government's investment of $1.25 billion to fund startups, projects and the development of LLMs have not been without hurdles, however.”

“Its chipmaking industry is still nascent, as the capital-intensive effort to set up fabs, or fabrication facilities, typically takes years, and running one requires specially trained professionals. India has yet to produce its first chip.”

Above is a topic I’ve highlighted before. While India is not Taiwan with its TSMC juggernaut, they do have an eye on that possible prize:

“While global chip firms are investing and setting up facilities in India as it races to build up the semiconductor industry and compete with major hubs such as Taiwan, analysts see a long road ahead.”

And Jensen captures the opportunity for India in pithy terms:

"Today, India as part of Nvidia's revenue is small," Huang said. "But our hopes are large."

India is indeed trying to cover all its AI bases as it were, and Nvidia is there with Jensen Huang, laser focused on the possibilities. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)