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The government will allow only India-incorporated companies to participate in the tender process to procure graphic processing units (GPUs) and provide services to users under the India Artificial Intelligence (IndiaAI) Mission, sources told ET.
The ministry of electronics and information technology is likely to float the tender to procure 1000 GPUs or equivalent AI compute capacity for now, a source said. The winning bidder will provide services for three years for now, which may be extended on mutually agreeable terms by the government.
On July 5, ET had exclusively reported that the IT ministry was likely to allow only Indian companies to run and manage the operations of GPUs to be procured under the Rs 10,372 crore India AI Mission.
As per the bid documents seen by ET, the IT ministry will also propose that the prospective bidders for the tender form a three-member consortium with one data centre provider, one cloud service provider and a systems integrator as partners. Of these three companies, one will act as the primary service provider, while the other two will be designated secondary partners, a source said.
All three members of the consortium will have to meet the criteria of being incorporated as a legal entity in India. The cloud services provided by the winner of the bid will also have to be delivered from a data centre based in India, a senior government official said.
Further, the cloud platform proposed by the bidders should either have operational AI services with a self-service portal and a minimum of 1000 AI compute units already installed, or an undertaking that these units will be made available within six months of winning the bid will have to be given, as per the bid document.
The successful bidder shall have to make these services available to academia, micro, small and medium enterprises, startups, researchers, government agencies, public sector companies and their agencies and any other companies or agencies approved by the central government.
“The successful bidders shall make the services available online, on-demand and allow end users to dynamically scale AI resources, up or down, as per their requirement,” another official said.
AI compute capacity of up to 100 hours will have to be made available on demand, while demand of up to 500 hours will have to be met within two days. A demand of 500 hours or more of AI compute capacity will have to be mandatorily made available within 7 days of such demand being raised by the end user, according to the bid document.
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