The Indian government will soon be hosting an open-source model like DeepSeek on Indian servers, Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Thursday.
“Already, the team has worked out the details of the servers required and how much capacity is needed. All those details have been worked out. We will very soon be hosting those open-source models on Indian servers,” said Vaishnaw.
This comes at a time when Chinese startup DeepSeek, with their open-source reasoning model R1, has challenged the narrative that models need access to large amounts of GPUs for building frontier models.
The government is working on a portal from which startups and researchers can access GPUs. Through this portal, startups and researchers will be able to access the highly valued GPUs necessary for training AI models at much lower prices.
The IT minister added that the government will provide a 40 percent subsidy to students on common compute facilities, so the cost to students will drop below Rs 100 per hour. He highlighted that India currently has around 10,000 GPUs available, out of a total of 18,000 GPUs. Of the 18,693 GPUs, 15,000 are high-end GPUs that have been incorporated into the process.
According to the union minister, DeepSeek was trained with more than 2,000 GPUs, while the ChatGPT version was trained with about 25,000 GPUs. He mentioned that technical partners interested in participating in this AI mission have already started working and investing.
“Our focus will be on utilizing the power of AI to solve population-scale problems. That is a very important focus. And in that, we had said that a major pillar of the India AI mission will be a series of applications that are useful for our people, including healthcare, education, agriculture, logistics, weather forecasting, flood forecasting, snow forecasting, and glacier measurement, all of which affect a large number of people,” Vaishnaw said.
The central government will provide a subsidy on artificial intelligence (AI) compute power for the next four years.
“In its currently approved form, we’ll be able to provide subsidies for four years. It’s a very sustainable period, and we believe that as we have more empowerments, the prices will actually go down significantly below what they have already come to,” Vaishnaw said in a press conference.
The move aims to make cutting-edge technology accessible to students, researchers, startups, and academic institutions across the country.
As part of the vision of ‘Making AI in India’ and ‘Making AI Work for India,’ the union cabinet had approved the national-level India Artificial Intelligence mission with a budget allocation of Rs 10,371.92 crore in March last year.