AI Compute In India To Cost Less Than Half Of Global Rates: Vaishnaw

Under ‘Common Compute Facility’ mission, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announces that his government will provide a 40% compute subsidy to the students, startups and researchers, which means for them compute will be available at the rate of less than Rs 100.

The average cost of artificial intelligence (AI) computing in India is Rs 115.85 per GPU hour, compared to the global market rate of $2.5–$3 (approximately ₹259) per GPU hour, added Vaishnaw.

Vaishnaw also mentioned the bid cost for high-end AI computing in the IndiaAI mission is approximately Rs 150/GPU hour.

Rs per GPU hour refers to the cost, in Indian Rupees (Rs), of using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) for one hour. It is a standard pricing metric used in cloud computing and AI/ML workloads, where companies or individuals rent GPUs from cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or other cloud providers.

The Union Minister called the bid rates of AI Computing in India 'Phenomenally Competitive’.

He further said, “Our government is looking to create a ‘Common Compute Facility' so that AI and compute power gets democratised. Modern technology should be accessible to every citizen, that is the thinking of our PM.”

In a bid to strengthen India's artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced on January 30 that the government's IndiaAI Mission has successfully empaneled around 19,000 GPUs from various data centres, including a significant number of high-end units.

GPUs play a crucial role in creating AI models by significantly accelerating the training and inference processes.

The minister stated that at least six major developers and startups are expected to build foundational models within the next 8-10 months.