US chip company Nvidia and telecom-to-retail giant Reliance announced an AI partnership on Friday to create language models, generative apps and a cloud infrastructure platform for AI development in the South Asian country.
Nvidia will provide the computing power needed for the effort, while Reliance unit Jio will manage and maintain the AI infrastructure and oversee customer engagement, the companies said.
Reliance will create AI applications and services for their 450 million Jio (telecom) customers and deliver energy-efficient AI infrastructure to scientists, developers and startups across India.
Mukesh Ambani, the billionaire chairman of Reliance, has previously spoken of the need for “digital infrastructure in India that can handle the immense computational demands of AI”.
Nvidia has a near-monopoly worldwide on the computing systems used for services like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot. The AI that powers such apps is known as a large language model, as it takes a text prompt and writes a human-like response from there.
The partnership gives Reliance access to the latest version of Nvidia’s Grace Hopper Superchip, the AI chips optimized to perform AI inference functions that effectively power apps like ChatGPT.
Reliance said the new AI infrastructure will accelerate a range of India’s key AI projects, including chatbots, drug discovery and climate research.
Neil Shah, a partner at Counterpoint Research, said the AI movement is critical for Jio to understand the data it has from millions of users and become a technology company that provides services beyond telecom.
“The AI infrastructure will enable it to make accurate recommendations and cross-sell products and services across its massive network of customers across the retail, telecom and financial space,” he said.
Reuters reported exclusively on Friday that oil-to-retail conglomerate Reliance is also considering a foray into chip manufacturing in India.
In addition, India’s Tata Group will also announce an AI partnership with Nvidia later on Friday, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
