India is set to launch its own safe and secure indigenous artificial intelligence (AI) model within six months at an affordable cost, Union Minister for Railways and Electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw, announced on Thursday. This move is expected to position India as a reliable technological powerhouse of ethical AI solutions.
The IndiaAI mission, backed by a high-end common computing facility, is now closer to customizing indigenous AI solutions for the domestic context using Indian languages. Scientists, researchers, developers, and coders are working on multiple foundational models, and the Union Minister expressed hope that the Indian AI model will 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 to users for less than ₹100 per GPU after subsidizing 40 percent 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 subsidy. Attractive half-yearly and annual plans will further enhance affordability.
The Indian AI model will have about nine times the capacity of China’s open-source model DeepSeek and about two-thirds of what ChatGPT offers. Safety and ethical deployment of the AI model remain top priorities for the government. To this end, the Union Minister announced the establishment of an AI Safety Institute, adopting a techno-legal approach.
The Indian AI model aims to promote innovation and develop citizen-centric governance tools, including various industrial applications with significant potential to harness technological benefits for the public. Over the past year and a half, India has been developing a robust AI ecosystem framework to support its own foundational AI model.
