India can leapfrog to accelerated computing as it has no legacy: NVIDIA Asia South MD

As the world looks to double the data centre industry size to about USD 8 trillion, India has an opportunity to leapfrog into accelerated computing as it has no legacy infrastructure, a senior official of GPU major NVIDIA said. Speaking at Tie-Con Delhi-NCR, NVIDIA Asia South Managing Director Vishal Dhupar said India can transform itself from being "back office" of the world to "the office" of the world.

He said the global data centre industry is around USD 4 trillion which is going to double and India has close to about 1-2 per cent of the total global capacity.

"We have no legacy. We are going to take this whole world's software into accelerated computing because it is common sense and I think yesterday's announcement (cabinet decision) is a signature to that fact," Dhupar said.

The Cabinet has approved the India AI Mission with an outlay of Rs 10,372 crore for five years to encourage AI development in the country.

Under the mission, supercomputing capacity, comprising over 10,000 GPUs (graphics processing units), will be made available to various stakeholders for creating an AI ecosystem.

The GPUs have been commonly in use in personal computers for processing multimedia content like video, digital games etc.

The demand for GPU-based servers has increased as they can process data at a higher speed compared to CPU-based servers.

"It makes more sense to go accelerated computing because the world is about a data centre and not about chip, not about a system, node or interconnect. One single data centre is a compute node. You need AI factories to translate what you nation's sensitivities, nation's culture, the way we think, all this will get codified into it and the nation will benefit from accelerated compute," Dhupar said.

The race for AI development among global companies has led to shortage of GPUs.

According to industry estimates, NVIDIA dominates the GPU market with about 88 per cent share and there is a lag of 12-18 months in getting GPUs from the company due to its high demand across the globe.

Dhupar said that GPU-based accelerated computing capacity can help the country solve several problems, especially those related to language barriers that restrict growth of businesses.

He said there is a need to develop AI models around Indic languages that will help address language barrier and expedite the growth of businesses.

In response to questions on job losses due to AI, Dhupar said that productivity is way forward. "For sure there will be displacement of jobs. You need to reskill and move. I am not too worried about job losses. I am worried about are we doing right skilling and upskilling," he said.

Dhupar said that India is a country of software engineers and it is the time now for the country to start building its own AI models.