India Advances AI Infrastructure: Seven Firms Shortlisted for Second Round of GPU Tender

MeitY shortlists 7 firms in second round of AI Mission GPU tender

Under the IndiaAI Mission, seven firms -- including AWS, Oracle, and Google Cloud partners -- were shortlisted for the second round of GPU tenders, aiming to procure 15,000 GPUs. Technical presentations are set for May 14. This initiative supports India's Rs 10,000-crore push to enhance AI infrastructure and local language model development.IndiaAI Mission has shortlisted seven companies -- including partners of Amazon Web Service (AWS), Oracle and Google Cloud -- for technical evaluation under the second round of the graphics processing units (GPU) tender, people aware of the development told ET. The Mission has invited the firms -- Netmagic IT Services (now known as NTT Global Data Centers & Cloud Infrastructure India, or NTT GDC India), Cyfuture India, Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Yotta Data Services, and Ishan Infotech -- for technical presentation of their proposals on May 14. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) expects to get 15,000 GPUs in this round. Vensysco and Locuz confirmed that they are partnering AWS. Ishan Infotech is an Oracle partner and NTT-Netmagic is a Google Cloud partner in India -- although details of their partnership for this bid are not known. "Vensysco's consortium partner will be Appsquadz Software, along with AWS," said Vikash Kumar Dubey, managing director of Vensysco Technologies. "We will offer 2,300 GPUs: 2,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 100 AWS Trainium 1 GPUs, and 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs. We are offering an additional 1,300 GPUs this time compared to last time's 1,000 GPUs," he told ET. Locuz, which is now owned by US IT infrastructure firm SHI International, had emerged as one of the five lowest (L1) bidders in the first round. Also Read: IndiaAI GPU tender: Lowest bidders receive AI workloads "Our new bid is different from the first one," Uttam Majumdar, founder of Locuz and senior vice president of business and services at SHI, told ET. He did not entertain any further queries. Yotta and Vensysco had emerged as L2 bidders among others in the first round. In that round, both Locuz and Vensysco had made similar offers of 1,000 GPUs, including 700 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs, and 100 AWS Trainium 1 GPUs. Anuj Bairathi, chief executive of Cyfuture India, told ET that the company has placed purchase orders for 1,184 GPUs. These include Nvidia H100 GPUs, L40S GPUs, and A100 GPUs, AMD's MI300 GPUs, and MI325 GPUs, and Intel's Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 GPUs. Cyfuture is a MeitY-empanelled cloud service provider who has built its fully integrated AI platform, Cyfuture.ai. The company did not qualify technically in the first round of the GPU tender. IndiaAI, NTT GDC India, Google Cloud, Sify, Yotta, Ishan, and Oracle did not respond to ET's requests for a comment. GPUs are a coveted resource worldwide with countries like the US imposing export restrictions on advanced AI chips including GPUs, to protect its AI leadership and national security. India had formally launched its Rs 10,000-crore India AI Mission in January, under which against the target of 10,000 GPUs outlined in the IndiaAI compute pillar, empanelled bidders have offered 14,517 GPUs at L1 rates. As part of the Mission, the government is also incentivising the development of local language models built by academia and industry with investment capital and other support. The move is aimed at building up India's AI prowess. "The bid submission is now open for third continuous empanelment," IndiaAI's website said, indicating that the third round of the GPU tender is now open for accepting bids. Also Read: Reliance Jio, CtrlS, other AI Mission GPU L1 bidders set to get workloads

IndiaAI Mission: Govt Shortlists 7 Companies For Second Round Of GPU Tender

These companies are invited by the IndiaAI Mission for the technical presentation of their proposals on May 14 The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has reportedly shortlisted seven companies, including Amazon Web Service (AWS), Oracle and Google Cloud for the second round of graphics processing units (GPU) tenders under the IndiaAI Mission. Among the companies shortlisted also include Sify Digital Services, Netmagic IT Services, Vensysco Technologies, Cyfuture India, Yotta Data Services, Locuz Enterprise Solutions and Ishan Infotech, ET reported. The report further said that MeitY is looking to add 15K GPUs from the second round. Further, these companies have been invited by the IndiaAI Mission for the technical presentation of their proposals on May 14. As per the report, Vensysco and Locuz are joining hands with AWS, while Ishan Infotech is partnered with Oracle and NTT-Netmagic is a Google Cloud partner in India. However, details of their partnership for this bid remain undisclosed. This development comes shortly after reports revealed that the electronics ministry would offer incentives to startups such as Sarvam AI, Soket AI Labs, Gnani.ai and Gan.ai for building frontier AI models under the mission.