Microsoft and Yotta Partner to Accelerate AI Adoption in India, Supporting IndiaAI Mission

Microsoft and Yotta Partner to Support IndiaAI Mission and Expand Hybrid AI Infrastructure | AIM

The collaboration supports the IndiaAI Mission and brings low-latency, secure AI solutions to sectors such as healthcare, finance, retail, and manufacturing. Microsoft and Yotta Data Services announced a strategic partnership on Wednesday to accelerate AI adoption in India by integrating Microsoft Azure AI services with Yotta's Shakti Cloud platform. The agreement allows the companies to jointly support startups, enterprises, government agencies, and research institutions across the country. Microsoft will bring Azure AI's models, apps, and tools to Shakti Cloud, while Yotta will provide sovereign cloud infrastructure equipped with GPU capabilities for training and inference. The collaboration supports the IndiaAI Mission and brings low-latency, secure AI solutions to sectors such as healthcare, finance, retail, and manufacturing. IndiaAI Mission, a MeitY initiative, has received over 500 proposals for indigenous AI model development as of May 2025. Microsoft and Yotta plan to work with IITs, research institutions, and startups to develop local AI capabilities that are aligned with India's Digital Public Infrastructure. "This partnership is a key step forward towards India's AI self-reliance and digital transformation," said Sunil Gupta, Co-founder, CEO and Managing Director of Yotta Data Services. "It will make cutting-edge AI capabilities accessible for Indian enterprises of all sizes and give a huge boost to driving the nation's AI ambitions." Puneet Chandok, president of Microsoft India and South Asia, said, "Our partnership with Yotta to power Shakti Cloud will help unlock AI innovation at scale. India is already among the top global markets for AI adoption and return on investment." The joint offering provides customers access to foundational large and small language models through Azure AI Foundry, combined with Yotta's sovereign AI infrastructure hosted in India. This includes built-in safety tools, copyright protection, content filters, and groundedness detection to support responsible AI development. Earlier in January 2025, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced a collaboration with IndiaAI, a division of Digital India Corporation, to set up AI Centres of Excellence and AI Productivity Labs. The goal is to advance AI research and promote inclusive growth across the country.Nadella also announced Microsoft's largest investment in India yet, a $3 billion commitment to expand Azure's infrastructure in the country.

Microsoft, Yotta join hands to drive AI innovation in India

Microsoft has partnered with Yotta Data Services to boost AI adoption in India by integrating Azure AI services with Yotta's Shakti Cloud. This collaboration aims to empower developers, startups, enterprises, and public sector organisations with advanced AI capabilities. The partnership supports the IndiaAI Mission by enhancing local AI capabilities and fostering innovation across key sectors like agriculture, healthcare, and education.Microsoft and Yotta Data Services on Wednesday announced they have partnered to drive Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption in India. Under this, Microsoft will bring its Azure AI services to Shakti Cloud, which is Yotta's AI cloud platform, to offer advanced capabilities to developers, startups, enterprises, and public sector organisations across India. The partnership enables Microsoft and Yotta -- which is a sovereign cloud infrastructure and platform services provider -- to engage with IndiaAI Mission participants, government agencies, IITs, startups, enterprises, and software development companies to drive AI innovation. The IndiaAI Mission, an initiative by the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY), aims to build a comprehensive ecosystem that fosters AI innovation in India, the release noted. "The partnership brings the dual advantage of the advanced AI models, apps, agents, and AI development environment from Azure AI and; a sovereign, economical, globally benchmarked AI compute platform, enabling fast AI model training and real-time inferencing, from Yotta to critical sectors like agriculture, healthcare, education, finance, manufacturing, retail, and media," according to the release. Microsoft-Yotta partnership also helps support the IndiaAI Mission by enhancing local AI capabilities, fostering innovation, and strengthening AI infrastructure. "As of May 2025, IndiaAI Mission has received over 500 proposals for developing indigenous AI models. Together, Microsoft and Yotta will work closely with government entities, research institutions, IITs, and startups to foster homegrown innovation and accelerate the development of indigenous AI models aligned with India's Digital Public Infrastructure," the release added.

Microsoft and Yotta Partner to Accelerate AI Adoption in India

AI model training, real-time inferencing, and secure deployments to benefit agriculture, healthcare, finance, and more. Microsoft and Yotta Data Services, India's sovereign cloud infrastructure and platform services provider, have partnered to accelerate AI adoption in India. Under this partnership, Microsoft announced it will bring its Azure AI services to Shakti Cloud, Yotta's AI cloud platform, to offer cutting-edge AI capabilities to developers, startups, enterprises, and public sector organisations across India. Also Read: Yotta Data Services Acquires IndiQus Technologies to Strengthen Cloud and AI Capabilities This partnership brings together the power of Microsoft's Advanced AI models, applications, agents and development environment from Azure AI with Yotta's GPU-based sovereign AI compute platform. The collaboration aims to enable faster AI model training, real-time inferencing, and secure solution deployment across key sectors such as agriculture, healthcare, education, finance, manufacturing, retail, and media. Microsoft said the partnership also helps support the IndiaAI Mission by enhancing local AI capabilities, fostering innovation, and strengthening AI infrastructure. As of May 2025, IndiaAI Mission has received over 500 proposals for developing indigenous AI models. Together, Microsoft and Yotta will work closely with government entities, research institutions, IITs, and startups to foster homegrown innovation and accelerate the development of indigenous AI models aligned with India's Digital Public Infrastructure. Commenting on the partnership, Puneet Chandok, President of Microsoft India and South Asia, said, "Our partnership with Yotta to power Shakti Cloud will help unlock AI innovation at scale. Microsoft is honored to play its part in helping the country realize its AI ambitions through innovation that reflect India's unique needs and priorities." He added, "India is already among the top global markets on AI adoption and return on investment. Together with Yotta, we will continue to help India become an AI-first nation, securely and responsibly." Also Read: IndiaAI and Meta Partner to Advance Open-Source AI Innovation, R&D and Skill Development Shakti Cloud customers will benefit from a rich ecosystem and vast catalogue of foundational LLMs and SLMs available on Azure AI Foundry to develop, deploy and scale at the speed of AI. Built-in safety tools, content filters, groundedness detection, and copyright protection will empower organizations to build and scale AI responsibly. As a global provider of software, infrastructure, and cloud services, Microsoft runs on trust and enables trustworthy AI by prioritising security, privacy, and safety. "This partnership is a key step forward towards India's AI self-reliance and digital transformation, and we are excited to be able to support Indian enterprises in their journey towards AI excellence with a full gamut of offerings. The combined strength of Microsoft's services backed by Yotta's infrastructure gives access to some of the best capabilities to support AI development in the country. It will make cutting-edge AI capabilities accessible for Indian enterprises of all sizes and give a huge boost to driving the nation's AI ambitions," said Sunil Gupta, Co-founder, CEO and Managing Director of Yotta Data Services. Also Read: Yotta Partners With BLC to Build Supercloud Data Center in Nepal In January 2025, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella announced a collaboration with IndiaAI, a division of Digital India Corporation, to advance AI and emerging technologies in the country, and established AI Centre of Excellence and AI Productivity Labs to foster inclusive growth. This partnership brings together Microsoft's Azure AI platform, ML Studio and Database and Application services, security portfolio and GitHub with Yotta's GPU infrastructure to deliver AI solutions hosted within India, Microsoft said in a joint statement on Wednesday, May 28, 2025. Also Read: Microsoft to Invest USD 3 Billion in India to Boost AI, Cloud, and Skilling: CEO "By enabling Microsoft's state-of-the-art AI models and services to run on Yotta's sovereign world-class AI infrastructure, the partnership will aim to pave the way for hybrid AI that prioritizes safety, trust, and low latency AI innovation for developers and enterprises to build and scale AI responsibly while ensuring data sovereignty," the statement added.

Microsoft and Yotta Announced Partnership to Accelerate AI Innovation in India

Microsoft and Yotta Data Services have partnered to accelerate AI adoption in India. Under this one-of-its-kind partnership, Microsoft will bring its AzureAI services to Shakti Cloud, Yotta's AI cloud platform, to offer cutting-edge AI capabilities to developers, startups, enterprises, and public sector organizations across India. Anchored in a shared vision to make India an AI-first nation, this partnership brings together Microsoft's trusted, scalable Azure AI platform, ML Studio and Database and Application services, Microsoft security portfolio and GitHub with Yotta's globally benchmarked robust GPU infrastructure to deliver high-performance, low-latency AI solutions hosted within India. By enabling Microsoft's state-of-the-art AI models and services to run on Yotta's sovereign

Microsoft-Yotta to power IndiaAI Mission, where Shakti Cloud meets Azure AI

Microsoft and Yotta have quietly struck a deal that, even after removing all hyperbole, addresses a very real gap in India's AI landscape. By combining Azure AI's rich library of large- and small-language models, ML Studio, GitHub Copilot and the rest with Yotta's Shakti Cloud - India's first sovereign GPU-backed compute platform - they're bolstering the backbone for low-latency, data-sovereign AI services across various industry sectors, from farming to fintech and beyond. For readers who've wrestled with laggy inference calls or fretted over where their user data actually resides, this matters. It means AI workflows that actually keep pace with India's business needs, without shuttling sensitive datasets overseas. Also read: AI Factories to Agentic Web: NVIDIA and Microsoft's vision for Future of AI Let's unpack what's happening under the hood of Shakti Cloud and Azure AI Foundry, why IndiaAI Mission is rallying around initiatives like this, and why, with China and the US forging ahead in both chip-and-code, India needs every edge it can get to keep up. At its core, Shakti Cloud is Yotta's attempt to stake "sovereign cloud" turf - an India-based data center and GPU farm that meets government requirements for local data. Think of it as a fenced, high-performance cluster where you can spin up H100 nodes via GPU-as-a-Service or fire off massive PyTorch trainings on Kubernetes without leaving Indian soil. Also read: Meet India's Datacentre Man and take a peek inside Asia's largest Tier-IV Datacentre According to Yotta, Shakti Cloud's platform layers in optimised network fabrics, on-prem inference appliances, and APIs for batch or real-time workloads. This matters, because when you're a startup or app developer building the next big thing in India, your AI inference calls don't ping around the world before they execute here in India. Azure AI Foundry is Microsoft's answer to "I don't want to reinvent the wheel." The AI wheel, specifically. Because Azure AI Foundry bundles pre-trained LLMs, SLMs and vision, speech and anomaly-detection models into a single catalogue. That's not all, there's also safety filters, content-grounding checkers, and built-in compliance tools in there, according to Microsoft. In practice, Shakti Cloud customers will find Foundry's endpoints show up in their local Azure portal, enabling one-click deployments to virtual private clouds or VPCs. No more juggling Dockerfiles or wrestling with token limits - just select a model, bind it to your data source, and you're off. This helps cut development times significantly. In case you didn't know, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's IndiaAI Mission exists to catalyze homegrown AI. This means everything from driving Indigenous model development to defining secure data-sharing frameworks. It has received 500+ proposals for "Made-in-India" LLMs and multimodal networks, at last count. By empanelling partnerships like Microsoft + Yotta, the Mission leans on proven cloud vendors to underwrite compute costs while research labs and startups focus on novel architectures, not hardware ops. Also read: India will introduce its own AI model in 10 months, says Ashwini Vaishnaw With their partnership, Microsoft and Yotta have stated their intent to work closely with government entities, research institutions, IITs, and startups to foster homegrown innovation and accelerate the development of indigenous AI models aligned with India's Digital Public Infrastructure. It's in line with India's aspiration to become a global AI hub, where recently three AI Centres of Excellence were also announced. If you look abroad, China has rolled out domestic GPU fabs and state-sponsored AI hubs. On the other hand, the US boasts national accelerator programs and multi-billion-dollar generative-AI startups. Unfortunately, India is still behind both these giants - brimming with talent, but hobbled by fragmented infrastructure and data-localization complexities. If "AI first" has to be more than a slogan, then predictable and local performance - by that I mean the ability to train, fine-tune, and serve AI solutions at scale - must be a baseline, not a luxury for Indian AI startups and developers. Which is why this Microsoft and Yotta partnership matters. Also read: India's 8-GPU gambit: Shivaay, a foundational AI model built against the odds It's about ensuring Indian companies - whether it's a Bengaluru health-tech startup or a Noida automaker - don't get left in the cold when AI becomes mission-critical for each and every business, beyond just consumer demand. Low-latency inference isn't just a developer convenience anymore, as it can be the difference between a real-time rural diagnostic app working reliably on 5G or stalling and slowing down at a dozen hops. And what can one say about data sovereignty? Suffice to say it isn't a checkbox anymore, but a matter of imperative trust for financial institutions and government agencies handling sensitive citizen records. If the IndiaAI Mission is about catalyzing compute so creators can create, then Yotta's Shakti Cloud and Microsoft Azure AI Foundry running at ground‐level speed just made that job a little easier. Here's hoping it all ultimately makes a difference in providing Indian AI a much-needed boost.