Nvidia and India’s Reliance partner to develop an expansive language model

As the largest Indian corporate firm enters the quickly growing but regionally unchallenged market, Reliance Industries’ Jio Platforms has teamed up with GPU giant Nvidia to collaborate on developing an extensive language model that is trained on India’s different languages, the two companies announced Friday.

The firms stated they would collaborate to develop an AI infrastructure that is “over an order of magnitude more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in India today,” but they did not provide a timeline. According to Reliance, the cloud infrastructure will give academics, developers, startups, scientists, AI professionals, and others in India access to accelerated computing.

Nvidia will provide Jio with the Nvidia DGX Cloud and Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip, as well as frameworks for building cutting-edge AI models, as part of the agreement. Jio will oversee client access and interactions as well as the management of the AI cloud infrastructure.

Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, met with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other local businesspeople during a recent trip to India. “We are delighted to partner with Reliance to build state-of-the-art AI supercomputers in India,” Huang stated. “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.”

Despite having the largest population in the world, India is yet to make a big impact on the global AI scene. The majority of local startups and established businesses in India have mostly concentrated on creating applications employing large language models produced by companies like OpenAI. Companies and nations throughout the world are vying for the highly sought-after Nvidia chips to power their own expansive language models.

Reliance, whose oil industry is its main source of income, has expanded into a number of industries over the past ten years in an effort to diversify its empire. These industries include telecom and video streaming. Jio Platforms, which is supported by Meta, Google, Qualcomm, and Intel, is increasingly establishing itself as a partner in the distribution of technology for numerous international giants. To develop cloud data centres and resell numerous business solutions, it still has a 10-year agreement with Microsoft. Additionally, just last month, the company extended its partnership with Netflix.

“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, in a statement.

Nvidia said separately that it had teamed up with the Indian Tata Group to train 600,000 TCS employees and build AI infrastructure with Tata Communications.

Industry insiders say a skills mismatch in the workforce contributes to India’s lack of AI-first firms. According to analysts, the launch of generative AI could eliminate numerous service work.