US chip firm NVIDIA and telecom-to-retail giant Reliance announced one on Friday Aye Partnership to build language models, generative apps, and a cloud infrastructure platform for AI development in the South Asian nation.
The companies said Nvidia will provide the computing power needed for the efforts, while the Reliance unit will manage and maintain the Jio AI infrastructure and oversee customer engagement.
“Reliance will build AI applications and services for its 450 million Jio (telecom) customers and provide energy-efficient AI infrastructure to scientists, developers and startups across India,” Nvidia said.
Reliance’s billionaire chairman Mukesh Ambani has previously spoken about the need for “digital infrastructure in India that can handle the huge computational demands of AI”.
Nvidia has a near-monopoly on computing systems used to power services globally chatbot, OpenAI’s blockbuster generative AI chatbot. The AI powering such apps is known as a large language model because it takes a text prompt and writes a human-like response from it.
The partnership will give Reliance access to the latest version of Nvidia’s Grace Hopper Superchip, its AI chips that are optimized to perform AI inference tasks that effectively power apps like ChatGPT.
Reliance said the new AI infrastructure will accelerate India’s key AI projects, including chatbots, drug discovery and climate research.
Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, said the AI move is important for Jio to “make sense” of data from millions of users and become a technology company that provides services beyond telecom.
“AI infra will enable it to provide accurate recommendations and cross-sell products and services to its vast network of customers across retail, telecom and financial sectors,” he said.
Oil-to-retail group Reliance is also considering entering chip manufacturing in India, Reuters exclusively reported on Friday.
separately, from India Tata Group The company is set to announce an AI partnership with Nvidia as soon as Friday, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
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