As India embarks on an exciting journey in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), OpenAI Co-founder and CEO Sam Altman emphasized the country’s significance in the AI landscape, calling it OpenAI’s second largest market globally. Altman spoke at an event alongside Union Minister for Railways and Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw.
Altman recently unveiled a monumental $500 billion project named ‘Stargate,’ which aims to build new AI infrastructure in the United States over the next four years, in collaboration with SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX. He highlighted that India should strive to be a leader in the AI model race. “India is a very important market for AI. It is our second biggest market. Models are still not cheap, but they are doable. India should be a leader there of course,” Altman told the gathering.
Addressing earlier comments on India’s ability to develop large language models (LLMs), Altman clarified that his statements had been taken out of context.
Union Minister Vaishnaw praised young Indian entrepreneurs for their focus on innovation and reducing costs, drawing parallels to the Chandrayaan mission. The country is set to launch its own safe and secure indigenous AI model within six months at an affordable cost, the minister announced last month.
The Indian AI model aims to position the country as a reliable technological powerhouse of ethical AI solutions. The IndiaAI mission, backed by a high-end common computing facility, is moving towards customizing indigenous AI solutions for the domestic context using Indian languages.
Scientists, researchers, developers, and coders are working on multiple foundational models, and with the current pace, the Union Minister expressed optimism that the Indian AI model would be ready within six months. The AI model will start with a computation facility of roughly 10,000 GPUs, with an additional 8,693 GPUs to be added soon. Initially, it will benefit researchers, students, and developers. The government has decided to offer the service for less than ₹100 per GPU, subsidizing 40% of the cost.
Compared to global models costing $2.5 to $3 per hour, India’s AI model will cost less than ₹100 per hour after the government subsidy. It boasts about nine times the capacity of China’s DeepSeek open-source model and approximately two-thirds of what ChatGPT offers.
