Global giants take AIm at India’s GPU ambition
cyber security firms have shown interest in the government’s Rs 10,000 crore graphics processing units (GPUs) procurement tender, central to India’s Artificial Intelligence Mission. Nvidia, Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Qualcomm, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Palo Alto Networks were among the scores of companies that attended a pre-bid meeting on Thursday.
The ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) termed the participation “exceptional” and said it will extend the last date for bids by two weeks from the date of publication of clarifications to the tender. It got around 500 suggestions on the tender from those who attended the meeting, said MeitY additional secretary Abhishek Singh.
Also present at the meeting were representatives from Yotta, L&T, E2E, Tata Communications and Vigyanlabs, among others.
As per the terms of the Request for Empanelment (RFE), the companies are either required to show the government a purchase order of 1,000 GPUs or have a stock of 1,000 GPUs in order to be eligible to bid.
Several issues were raised by global GPU manufacturers, cloud service providers and data centre operators and MeitY has told them it will take these points into consideration and issue a clarification, besides extending the deadline from the current September 6, said people aware of the matter.
“There is lots of enthusiasm and interest in the India AI Mission,” Singh said. “We have received a huge response to the RFE. As is the process with any government tender, we
