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Recently, NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang personally delivered the first NVIDIA DGX H200 to OpenAI, a gesture similar to the one made in 2016. However, Indian AI companies aren’t receiving the same treatment from the GPU king.
For instance, when Yotta received the first shipment of 4,000 GPUs with much fanfare, the boxes bearing the ASUS logo caught everyone’s attention, but there was barely any NVIDIA soul around. And the energy, alas, was nothing like that in Silicon Valley or the West.
ASUS helped Yotta procure NVIDIA GPUs by providing the ESC N8-E11 server, which is equipped with eight NVIDIA HGX H100 GPUs to enhance Yotta’s Shakti Cloud platform for AI model development and deployment.
NVIDIA’s Love for Yotta is Elite
Yotta plans to scale up its GPU inventory to 32,768 units by the end of 2025. Last year, the company announced that it would import 24,000 GPUs, including NVIDIA H100s and L40S, in a phased manner.
However, acquiring the highly valued NVIDIA GPUs is no mean feat. NVIDIA sells its GPUs through the NVIDIA Partner Program, which includes Registered, Preferred, and Elite categories. According to NVIDIA’s blog post, Elite partners represent the highest level of partnership and the tag is reserved for those demonstrating exceptional commitment.
In a recent interview with Forbes, Yotta chief Sunil Gupta, aka the ‘Data Centre Man of India’, said that the company was part of the NVIDIA Partner Network. “NVIDIA has put its entire weight behind us. We are an Elite partner of the NVIDIA Partner Network. NVIDIA is giving very high-priority allocations to us,” he said.
Gupta added that India could build five GPT-4 models simultaneously using its existing infrastructure. “I have ordered 16,000 [GPUs], so if there are five customers each wanting to make a GPT-4, I can handle their load simultaneously,” said Gupta.
Interestingly, Yotta is India’s sole NVIDIA Partner Network Cloud Partner (NCP) and has ascended to the Elite Partner status on the global NCP list. The company will also receive NVIDIA’s latest GPU Blackwell by October. Other Elite members of NCP include AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Meta.
What about the others?
“If you talk about high-end NVIDIA GPUs like the H100, they’re actually not available in India,” said Vivek Raghavan, founder of Sarvam AI, adding that the situation is expected to change soon.
Similarly, Vishnu Vardhan, SML chief and creator of Hanooman, told AIM that they faced a shortage of NVIDIA GPUs and had to search across multiple places to purchase them when they began training Hanooman.
“NVIDIA GPUs are considered the best in the market due to the extensive software libraries built to support them. This makes it possible for even a fresh out-of-school kid to work with NVIDIA GPUs,” said Vardhan, adding that he currently possesses more than 1,000 GPUs.
Despite the near-absence of NVIDIA GPUs, AI startups in India have remained resilient. India’s AI unicorn Ola Krutrim, for instance, is actively engaged in pre-training Krutrim’s foundational models using the Intel Gaudi 2 cluster.
Much like Yotta’s Shakti, Ola Krutrim has also introduced the Krutrim AI Cloud, offering developers access to a variety of open-source models. However, there is no clarity on whether Bhavish Aggarwal-led startup is using NVIDIA’s GPUs or not.
Zoho is also exploring NVIDIA alternatives. ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, recently invested nearly $10 million in procuring GPUs from all three major providers—Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
The Indian Union Cabinet recently approved an INR 10,371.92 crore AI program, which includes deploying 10,000 GPUs through public-private partnerships. The government plans to adopt a rent-and-sublet model to provide these GPUs to AI startups in India.
Last year, NVIDIA promised that India would receive tens of thousands of GPUs and partnered with Reliance, Tata, and the government. The government plans to establish a cluster of 25,000 GPUs for startups.
NVIDIA GPUs are anticipated to enter the Indian market post the Lok Sabha elections.
