All the seven shortlisted companies have cleared the technical round and their commercial bids opened yesterday (May 22)
The lowest price and lowest bidder for GPU variants is yet to be disclosed
Under the second round of bidding, the Centre is aiming to give 15,000 GPUs
Days after getting shortlisted for the second round of GPU tender under the IndiaAI Mission, all the seven companies have now cleared the technical round.
An ET report, citing sources, said that all the shortlisted companies have cleared the technical presentation round and their commercial bids were opened yesterday.
The lowest price for GPU models offered by bidders and the name of the lowest bidder for various GPU variants will likely be disclosed next week.
Notably, the selected bidders include –
As per the sources, Cyfuture has placed a purchase order for 1,184 GPUs (including NVIDIA’s H100, L40S and A100 GPUs, AMD’s MI300 and MI325 GPUs and Intel’s Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 GPUs).
Vensysco has proposed to offer 2,300 GPUs (including 2,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 100 AWS Trainium 1 GPUs, and 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs)
Yotta has proposed to offer NVIDIA Blackwell B200s. Whereas, GPU proposals from other rest of the bidders are yet to come.
This comes on the back of IndiaAI CEO Abhishek Singh disclosing that out of 18,000 GPU bids received, only 15,000 GPUs will be offered after checking technical qualifications and commercial bid-opening.
In 2024, the government launched IndiaAI Mission with an initial outlay of INR 10,372 Cr over the next five years.
With this mission, the Centre aims to build an AI ecosystem, offering supercomputing capabilities comprising over 10,000 GPUs to various stakeholders including startups, academic institutions, government agencies and research institutes.
In the first phase, the government invited proposals from Indian academic institutions, R&D organisations, companies, and startups engaged in areas such as machine unlearning, synthetic data generation, AI bias mitigation and more.
These applicants (receivers) submitted proposals regarding their needs for GPUs to execute their AI projects.
In the first bidding round, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology invited bids from cloud services providers and data centre operators (providers) to supply and manage AI computing infrastructure including GPUs.
The Centre selected ten tech giants including Jio Platforms, Tata Communications, CMS Computers India Pvt Ltd, Ctrls Datacenters Ltd, E2E Networks Limited, Locuz Enterprise Solutions Ltd, Orient Technologies Ltd, NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies Private Ltd, Vensysco Technologies Limited and Yotta Data Services Limited.
The government also recently Picked Bengaluru-Based Sarvam AI to build India’s first homegrown sovereign large language model (LLM) under this mission.
Last month, the Centre also assigned AI projects to Hiranandani Group’s Yotta Data Services, E2E Networks and NxtGen Cloud Technologies offering GPUs under the IndiaAI Mission.
Notably, the bidders are expected to either provide their own data centres or partner with global cloud providers to deliver GPUs under IndiaAI Mission.
Similarly, the seven selected bidders in the second round are either partners with global giants or give access to their own data centres. It is pertinent to note that these providers do not deliver physical GPUs.
For instance, Vensysco and Locuz are partners with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Ishan Infotech is partnering with Oracle and Netmagic is collaborating with Google Cloud to offer GPUs.
Besides, bidders like Cyfuture have already placed a purchase order for the GPUs it is committing to offer.
