Nvidia, Reliance Announce Partnership to Build AI Infrastructure in India

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang invited Reliance Industries Ltd Chairman Mukesh Ambani on stage with him for a sit-down chat at the company’s AI Summit event in Mumbai. The two corporate leaders spoke about India’s future in the information age, and announced a partnership to build AI infrastructure that will be able to handle the massive amounts of data being generated as 5G connectivity spreads and young engineers here gain skills.

The news comes just days after Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that preliminary discussions are in progress with Nvidia regarding the possibility of developing AI hardware in India as part of the government’s “AI mission”. The government envisions deploying AI for public services and building a 10,000-GPU AI supercomputer.

Speaking at the AI Summit, Huang expressed admiration for India’s talented young workforce, saying that Nvidia has over 10,000 engineers here and has upskilled about 200,000 professionals in the IT industry. “As you know, the IT industry of India is world renowned for its very large scale, not just in size, but in deep expertise of computer science. Very few countries in the world have this amazing natural resource,” Huang said.

The wide-ranging conversation covered Jio’s journey to becoming the world’s top data company by volume, delivering almost 16 Exabytes of data this year at a fraction of the cost of data in other countries such as the US. Ambani also spoke about building green power infrastructure at Reliance’s Jamnagar facilities, and how cloud-based AI processing relieves common people of the burden of hardware costs, allowing greater penetration and skill development. 

Both Huang and Ambani referenced Meta’s open-source Llama 3 AI framework which Reliance is developing on top of, while adding that Indian and localised large-language models (LLMs) are the next big step in the multi-decade journey of AI deployment and development. “I can assure you that, like we did in data, in a few years from now we will surprise the world with what India and Indians can achieve in the intelligence market,” Ambani declared. 

The two also remarked on the similarity between the name Nvidia and the Hindi word “vidya”, meaning knowledge. Huang said he was aware of the reference and it gave him great satisfaction when Nvidia was just starting out, while Ambani invoked the goddesses Saraswati and Lakshmi, saying prosperity follows knowledge. “32 years ago, I knew this. And now the story of Nvidia has been revealed to all of you!” Huang remarked to the audience.