Nvidia H100 chips in a server room at Yotta Data Services Pvt. Ltd. data center, Navi Mumbai, India, March 14, 2024.
Dheeraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images
American AI chip darling Nvidia is expanding its partnerships in India, including with venture capital firms, betting on the country’s AI ecosystem, which has attracted huge Big Tech investments.
The company said in a statement on Wednesday that it is working with multiple venture capital firms, including Peak XV, Z47, Elevation Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Accel India, to identify and fund AI startups.
This comes as venture capital investors are increasingly showing interest in Indian technology startups as the country’s strong initial public offering market offers lucrative returns.
India is currently hosting an AI summit, attended by CEOs of major technology companies and heads of state. Nvidia’s top boss Jensen Huang was also scheduled to attend, but declined due to “unforeseen circumstances.”
According to the chip designer, more than 4,000 AI startups in India have already joined Nvidia’s Global Startup Program, which helps tech startups build, scale and bring to market.
The world’s largest company by market capitalization also said it continues to work with government agencies and research institutes to build data centers in the country.
Nvidia’s efforts are framed around New Delhi’s IndiaAI Mission, which aims to strengthen the country’s AI capabilities and free up capital for AI entrepreneurs.
More broadly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has set a goal for India to grow into a global technology powerhouse. As of September last year, New Delhi had approved $18 billion worth of semiconductor projects aimed at building a domestic supply chain.
Nvidia has also partnered with Indian cloud providers such as Yotta, Larsen & Toubro, and E2E Networks to provide AI chip clusters and help build data centers in India.
New Delhi officials said Tuesday that the country expects to invest up to $200 billion in data centers over the next few years, according to reports.
India’s Adani announced plans to invest $100 billion in AI-enabled data centers powered by renewable energy. U.S. tech companies, including hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft and Google, are pumping more than $50 billion into domestic AI infrastructure and chips.
Meanwhile, Nvidia said it is also supporting AI companies in India through NVIDIA Nemotron Models, a family of Nvidia AI models that organizations can use to build new chatbots, agents, and voice systems.
These Nvidia models can be used by Indian companies to train new AI systems based on India-specific data and languages, in line with the country’s goal of building sovereign AI.
Sovereign AI refers to a country’s ability to build artificial intelligence on its own infrastructure, data, and industry so that increasingly important AI systems are not dependent on foreign providers.
