Nvidia partners Reliance, L&T, TCS, others for GPU infra at AI Summit

New Delhi: Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company, on Wednesday announced a spate of partnerships with top Indian enterprises for its graphics processing unit (GPU) chips, the cornerstone of artificial intelligence (AI). The company has partnered with Reliance New Energy, Hero MotoCorp, Larsen and Toubro Semiconductor, and Tata Consultancy Services, among others.

The partnerships involve access to Nvidia’s computing chips, as well as open-source AI models and AI development software across industrial applications.

Nvidia also said that India’s tech services firms, including Infosys, Persistent Systems, Tech Mahindra and Wipro, are using its enterprise software platforms to onboard new software management capabilities for clients.

The partnerships come at a time when India’s $283-billion IT services industry is under pressure from foundational AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic—whose models are automating the very tasks that they built their businesses upon.

Vishal Dhupar, managing director for South Asia at Nvidia, said at a media briefing that India continued to be one of the most important markets for the company. “India’s strength lies in its ability to quickly adopt accelerated computing, and leverage from the jumps in efficiency for computing infrastructure that we are seeing in GPU technologies,” he said.

With a market cap of more than $4 trillion, Nvidia is the world’s most valuable company, after seeing a meteoric rise in its fortunes ever since generative AI became a household term through the premiere of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Speaking on generative AI, Nvidia also underlined existing partnerships with India’s Gen AI startups—many of which are backed by the Indian government’s $1.2-billion AI Mission.

Companies using its GPUs to build foundational models in AI include BharatGen, CoRover, Gnani, Sarvam and Soket, among those funded by the ministry of electronics and IT (Meity)’s AI Mission.

Dhupar, however, did not comment on whether GPUs would continue to remain in prevalence as the world’s foundational AI infrastructure, or if lower-cost, general purpose central processing units (CPUs) may take over.

The announcements were made on the sidelines of India’s five-day AI Impact Summit, which saw a number of billion-dollar investment promises made on Tuesday.

For Nvidia, chief executive Jensen Huang was expected to be a star attraction at the event, before dropping out on Saturday. The company is represented at the Summit by Jay Puri, its executive vice-president.

Speaking about the partnerships announced on Wednesday, the company said in a blog post that its role among top Indian enterprises comes through software integration firms Cadence Design Systems, Siemens and Synopsys, which continue to increase Nvidia’s role as a key technology provider for India’s top conglomerates.

“India is entering a new age of industrialization, as AI transforms how the world designs, builds and runs physical products and systems. The country is investing $134 billion in new manufacturing capacity across construction, automotive, renewable energy and robotics, creating both a massive challenge and opportunity to build software-defined factories from day one,” the post read.

In November, Nvidia also joined the India Deep-Tech Alliance (IDTA), a group of top technology firms and venture capital investors, to fund private AI startups in the country. On Tuesday, IDTA announced expansion of its fund to over $2.5 billion, and committed to collectively invest $1 billion in Indian AI startups in the next three years.