Nvidia is partnering with major Indian VC firms in search for the country’s next AI start-ups
Nvidia H100 chips inside a server room at the Yotta Data Services Pvt. data center, in Navi Mumbai, India, March 14, 2024.
Dhiraj Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images
American AI chip darling Nvidia is expanding its partnerships in India, including with venture capital firms, as it bets on the country’s AI ecosystem that has drawn massive Big Tech investments.
The company in statement on Wednesday said it was working with several venture capital firms, including Peak XV, Z47, Elevation Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Accel India to identify and fund AI startups.
This comes as venture capital investors have been increasingly showing interest in India’s technology startups, with the country’s strong initial public offerings market providing lucrative returns.
India is currently holding an AI summit that has seen major tech CEOs as well as heads of states participate in the event. Nvidia top boss Jensen Huang was also expected to attend it but withdrew due to “unforeseen circumstances.”
More than 4,000 AI startups in India’s have already joined Nvidia’s global startup program, which helps tech startups build, scale, and go to market, according to the chip designer.
The world’s largest company by market cap also said it was collaborating with government agencies and research institutions, as well as continuing efforts to build the country’s domestic data centers.
Nvidia’s efforts are framed around New Delhi’s “IndiaAI mission,” aimed at strengthening the country’s AI capabilities and free up funding for its AI entrepreneurs.
More broadly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has set goals for India to grow into a global tech superpower. As of September last year, New Delhi had approved $18 billion worth of semiconductor projects as it looks to build a domestic supply chain.
Nvidia has also partnered with Indian cloud providers such as Yotta, Larsen & Toubro, and E2E Networks to provide its AI chip clusters and help build data centers in the country.
A New Delhi official reportedly said Tuesday that the country expects as much as $200 billion in investments for data centers over the next few years.
India’s Adani has announced plans to invest $100 billion toward renewable energy-powered AI-ready data centers. American tech firms including hyperscalers Amazon, Microsoft and Google have committed more than $50 billion toward AI infrastructure and chips in the country.
Meanwhile, Nvidia said it was also supporting India’s AI companies through its “NVIDIA Nemotron models” — a family of Nvidia AI models that organizations can use to build new chatbots, agents, and speech systems.
These Nvidia models can be used by Indian companies to train new AI systems on India-specific data and language, aligning with the the country’s goal of build sovereign AI.
Sovereign AI refers to a country’s ability to build artificial intelligence based on its own infrastructure, data and industry, so that increasingly critical AI systems don’t depend on foreign providers.
