India’s technology professionals are emerging to be the ‘front-office’ of the world’s artificial intelligence (AI) revolution by reskilling themselves with AI-native skills, Jensen Huang, chief executive, Nvidia said.Pune Investment
“India has the largest population of IT professionals, there is no question they will be reskilled for AI,” Huang said.Lucknow Investment
“When I speak with the leaders in India, it is clear to them this is one of the greatest opportunities for them (India’s engineers) to reskill themselves and instead of IT of the back-room of companies, they will now become the IT of the front-room of the companies where value is created,” Huang said in response to ET’s question at a press briefing in San Jose, California.
He said that his conversations with Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlight India’s need to become a part of AI value addition rather than just exporting India’s data to train super-sized large language models.
“He (PM Modi) said to me, Jensen, India should not export flour to import bread, this makes perfect sense. Why export the raw material to import the value add. Why export the data of India, so that you can import AI,” Huang said.
“AI is used for engineering, marketing, sales, finance, business operations, all of that in front office, not back office. I think, that’s where the largest market opportunity lies and I think it’s absolutely brilliant, I’m very excited for it.”
When asked about whether Nvidia is part of Government of India’s commitment to import 10,000 GPUs, Huang jokingly said that he’s “open to business.”
“We’re very interested in it, if somebody would like to buy some GPUs, I’m open for business. Tell everybody, spread the word, Nvidia’s open for business,” he said.Surat Stock
The Union Cabinet, last week, approved a Rs 10,371.92 crore India Artificial Intelligence Mission for the next five years, aimed at creating computing infrastructure in public-private partnerships.
As many as 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) will be made available to startups and a marketplace will be created for this, benefitting R&D facilities and startups, commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal had said.
Nvidia’s Huang was speaking with media persons on the sidelines of the Nvidia GPU Technology conference on Tuesday. The AI superchip-maker company, on Monday, announced its most powerful Blackwell GPU chip capable of processing trillion-parameter AI models upto 30 times faster and at one-fourth use of power, compared to its predecessor.
The Blackwell chips are set to be used by Amazon Web Services, Dell Technologies, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Tesla and xAI.
They will also power sovereign AI clouds including India’s Shakti Cloud offering by the Hiranandani group’s data center arm Yotta Data Services, which localises end-to-end data storage requirements of governments and enterprises.
Among private companies, Reliance Industries, Yotta Data Services, and Netweb Technologies are known to have collaborated with Nvidia to build and install GPU-based servers in India.
Yotta’s shipment of chips has started landing to the country’s shores and shall be deployed soon. It plans to install over 20,400 Nvidia GPU-based supercomputers by June 2024.
(The reporter is in San Jose to cover the GPU Technology Conference at the invitation of Nvidia.)
Chennai Stock