Reliance Industries and NVIDIA on Friday announced a collaboration to develop India's own foundation large language model trained on the country's diverse languages and tailored for generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications to serve the world's most populous nation.
The companies say they will work together to build AI infrastructure that is expected to be more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in India. NVIDIA will provide access to the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and NVIDIA DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service in the cloud.
The NVIDIA-powered AI infrastructure is the foundation of the new frontier into AI for Reliance Jio Infocomm, Reliance Industries' telecom arm.
This comes at a time when India's top IT companies - Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro - have announced investments in generative AI.
To serve India's vast potential in AI, Reliance says it will create AI applications and services for its 450 million Jio customers and provide energy-efficient AI infrastructure to scientists, developers and startups across India.
"As India advances from a country of data proliferation to creating technology infrastructure for widespread and accelerated growth, computing and technology super centres like the one we envisage with NVIDIA will provide the catalytic growth just like Jio did to our nation’s digital march," says Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries.
AI can help rural farmers interact via cell phones in their local language to get weather information and crop prices, the two firms say in a joint statement. "It can help provide, at massive scale, expert diagnosis of medical symptoms and imaging scans where doctors may not be immediately available. AI can better predict cyclonic storms using decades of atmospheric data, enabling those at risk to evacuate and find shelter," the statement adds.
The AI infrastructure will be hosted in AI-ready computing data centres that will eventually expand to 2,000 megawatts. Execution and implementation will be managed by Jio, which has extensive offerings and experience across mobile telephony, 5G spectrum, fiber networks and more.
"India has scale, data and talent. With the most advanced AI computing infrastructure, Reliance can build its own large language models that power generative AI applications made in India, for the people of India," says Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
The collaboration with NVIDIA also aligns with Jio's strategy of serving as a large, comprehensive digital, cloud and networking platform for both consumers and business customers.
"At Jio, we are committed to fueling India's technology renaissance by democratising access to cutting-edge technologies, and our collaboration with NVIDIA is a significant step in this direction," says Akash Ambani, chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm. "Together, we will develop a state-of-the-art AI cloud infrastructure that is secure, sustainable and deeply relevant across India, accelerating the nation's journey towards becoming an AI powerhouse."
