India Launches National AI Mission with Rs 10,372 Crore — 10,000 GPUs, 5 Research Centres, 1 Lakh AI Professionals by 2027
The Union Cabinet approved the IndiaAI Mission with a corpus of Rs 10,372 crore, the largest government investment in an emerging technology in India's history, aimed at positioning India as a global AI powerhouse by 2030.
Representative image. Photo: Nationalism News
The Union Cabinet on Friday cleared the IndiaAI Mission — India's most ambitious technology initiative since the Digital India programme — allocating Rs 10,372 crore to build AI infrastructure, research capacity and a skilled workforce over the next four years.
The mission has four pillars: compute infrastructure (Rs 4,564 crore for 10,000 Graphics Processing Units), AI research centres at five IITs (Rs 2,000 crore), the India Datasets Platform for open AI training data (Rs 1,500 crore), and talent development including 1 lakh AI-trained professionals by 2027 (Rs 2,308 crore).
Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw described the mission as "India's moonshot for artificial intelligence" and said the government-backed GPU compute facility would be available to researchers, startups and MSMEs at subsidised rates, democratising access to expensive AI infrastructure.
The AI research centres will be set up at IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Madras, IIT Hyderabad and IISc Bengaluru, each focusing on different domains: health AI, agricultural AI, smart cities, climate AI and natural language processing for Indian languages.
The AI mission also includes a Rs 500 crore fund for AI startups and a commitment to build a foundational AI model for India that will natively support all 22 scheduled Indian languages — a clear alternative to models like GPT-4 that perform poorly on regional Indian languages.
Industry body NASSCOM estimated the mission would generate over 10 lakh AI-related jobs by 2030 and add $100 billion to India's GDP. However, critics noted the budget remains smaller than comparable investments by the US ($52 billion), China ($40 billion) and the EU (€20 billion).
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