Reliance teams up with Nvidia to boost India's AI capabilities

Partners aim to build AI infrastructure that will be more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in the Asian country today

Reliance aims to create AI applications and services for about 450 million Jio customers. Reuters

Reliance Industries, the conglomerate controlled by its billionaire chairman Mukesh Ambani, has joined forces with the US technology company Nvidia to develop India’s own large language model.

The companies aim to build artificial intelligence infrastructure that will be more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in India today, Nvidia said on Friday.

Large language models are types of generative AI that can imitate human intelligence. They can distinguish, review, translate, forecast and produce new content – text, audio or visual – using large data sets.

The new model will be trained on India’s diverse languages and tailored for generative AI applications, the company said.

The Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure is the “foundation of the new frontier into AI” for Reliance Jio Infocomm, Reliance's telecoms arm, it added.

“India has scale, data and talent. With the most advanced AI computing infrastructure, Reliance can build its own large language models that power generative AI applications made in India, for the people of India,” said Nvidia's founder and chief executive Jensen Huang.

Globally, AI investments are projected to hit $200 billion by 2025 and could possibly have a bigger impact on gross domestic product, Goldman Sachs Economic Research said in a report last month.

In a country such as India, the world’s most populous nation, AI can significantly contribute to the well-being of society.

It can help farmers to obtain weather information and crop prices in their local language and provide expert diagnosis of medical symptoms and imaging scans where doctors may not be immediately available.

AI can better predict storms using decades of atmospheric data, enabling those at risk to evacuate and find shelter.

Reliance said it aims to create AI applications and services for about 450 million Jio customers and provide energy-efficient AI infrastructure to scientists, developers and start-ups across the country.

The infrastructure will be hosted in AI-ready computing data centres that will eventually expand to a capacity of 2,000 megawatts.

Execution and implementation will be managed by Jio.

“We are committed to fuelling India’s technology renaissance by democratising access to cutting-edge technologies, and our collaboration with Nvidia is a significant step in this direction,” said Akash Ambani, chairman of Reliance Jio Infocomm.

“We will develop a state-of-the-art AI cloud infrastructure that is secure, sustainable and deeply relevant across India, accelerating the nation’s journey towards becoming an AI powerhouse.”