Tata Group: Reliance, Tata tie up with Nvidia for AI infra- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI could soon become India’s biggest export

BENGALURU: Nvidia, which in the past few months surged to become the 6th most valuable company in the world after it came to be known that its chips were driving the generative AI boom started by ChatGPT, has struck two significant partnerships for establishing AI (artificial intelligence) infrastructure in India – with Reliance Industries and Tata Group.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, who is visiting India and who announced the partnerships at a media conference in Bengaluru, said such infrastructure could make AI India’s biggest export soon. “India already has lots of data. You have very diverse languages, a diverse population with diverse needs, different from the rest of the world, which means you have a local market. You also produce more computer scientists than any other country on the planet (to create solutions for the world). The only thing the country really needs is the computing infrastructure,” he said.
The partnership with Reliance is for the company to service its 450 million customers, while that with Tata Group is to establish infrastructure that other Indian companies can use.
Reliance is expected to develop a large language model trained on India’s vernacular languages and roll out generative AI services. That could enable services like real-time translations that allow two people speaking different languages to understand each other. “Reliance probably has more customers than any company on the planet. They have more data than any company on the planet. They probably support all 22 languages. We’re going to build AI infrastructure. And as a result, they can create AI models and AI services for their customers,” said Huang.
For the Tatas, group company Tata Communications will establish the infrastructure. That infrastructure, Huang said, will support all the AI companies in India. “They (AI companies) are all clamouring for access to infrastructure. Today, they have to export their engineers to go work in California, to access the infrastructure. There’s no reason to do that if you build the infrastructure here,” he said. Tata Communications could provide supercomputing on a rental or pay-as-you-go model to Indian AI companies. Huang said TCS will use the infrastructure to train its over 600,000 IT professionals in AI, so that “instead of developing business operations applications in the backroom, they will be creating AI applications for the front office.”
Tata Motors, he said, is undertaking a digital transformation – from design, styling, engineering, simulation testing, all the way to the autonomous vehicle capabilities – and AI will be part of that entire chain. The AI infrastructure, he said, will enable Tata Motors to “build in India, use in India, and even export from India.”
On Monday, Huang, now the 28th richest man in the world following Nvidia’s share price surge, had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Delhi. Huang said he told the PM that Nvidia wants to help accelerate the building of AI infrastructure in the country. “There is no need to export all of the data created here to companies in the west. AI could be built in India, used in India, and exported from India, but you need to have infrastructure, just like we need power plants to produce electricity.”
This unique infrastructure required to “produce intelligence,” as Huang put it, is a mixture of hardware, software, and networking elements. That hardware includes Nvidia’s specialised chips, which previously were used primarily in gaming, given the enormous computing power that gaming applications required, but which companies like OpenAI (which created ChatGPT) realised were crucial to rapidly process the vast amounts of data used in generative AI models.
Huang said he also told the PM that Nvidia has ambitious plans to help reskill India’s entire IT workforce to make them AI-ready and that the company is already reskilling its own workforce. “We will partner with all of our friends here to reskill the entire IT workforce and produce the largest AI workforce in the world. My prediction, and this is what I told Modiji (PM Narendra Modi), is that the next time I come to India, it is very likely that one of the largest export products of India will be AI. That you will produce and export more AI expertise than any country in the world. And it potentially could be your largest export.”
“As India advances from a country of data proliferation to creating technology infrastructure for widespread growth 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,” Reliance Industries chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani said.
N. Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Sons, said, “The advancements in AI have made focus on AI a central priority in governments, industries and society at large. The impact of AI and machine learning is going to be profound across industries and every aspect of our lives. This is a key transformational trend of the decade, and every company must prepare to make this AI transition. Our partnership with Nvidia will democratize access to AI infrastructure, accelerate build-out of AI solutions and enable upgradation of AI talent at scale.”

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