Ola Krutrim to Invest Rs 10,000 Crore in Krutrim AI Over Next One Year

Ola Krutrim is ramping up its investment with a planned investment of Rs 10,000 crore over the next year. As part of this effort, the company also recently launched India’s first AI frontier research lab, Krutrim AI Lab.

The company has already invested over Rs 2,000 crore to build India's largest AI computing clusters which are named GB200 and NVL72. These systems use NVIDIA's technology, which includes super-fast processors and powerful graphics chips to quickly process AI tasks.

“Our goal is to drive greater usage with our expanding cloud infrastructure and the increasing availability of GPUs, “ said Navendu Agarwal, Group CIO, Ola Electric. Agarwal was speaking at Krutrim AI’s event titled ‘Samvad: Krutrim AI: Meet & Greet’ which was held in Gurugram on February 24.

Agarwal further highlighted that despite the availability of GPUs, their usage hasn’t scaled significantly yet in India. “Adoption is still limited because use cases are still being developed,” he added. The Indian government is working to build a computing network with over 10,000 GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission. Last August, it also finalized a plan to buy 1,000 GPUs as part of this initiative.

While the company hasn’t applied for the GPU tender of the government yet, they plan to do so in the coming months. Agarwal added, “Our focus is on creating a secure and cost-effective AI environment, reducing reliance on expensive US-based models. We offer users the ability to deploy AI models on our platform at significantly lower costs.”

Krutrim AI recently launched several models such as the multilingual vision language model (VLM) named Chitrarth-1 which combines capabilities from both computer vision (to understand images) and natural language processing (to understand and generate text). ). It is built to work across 10 prominent Indian languages—Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Tamil, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, and Assamese—as well as English. “Even with the AI available in India today, we feel our own perspective is missing. It does not fully represent our culture, and as more languages emerge, we risk losing our cultural sensitivities,” said Agarwal. 

While highlighting that Krutrim AI is different from global companies, Agarwal said that their focus is not on building the biggest model to compete with the West, which has access to massive GPU resources. Instead, the company is creating AI suited to the Indian context, optimized for the right cost and performance.

(UPDATE: The story was amended at 16:46 PM as the company clarified that Rs 10,000 crore will be invested in Ola Krutrim as a whole, and not just on GPUs.)