India to attract over $200 billion investment in AI: Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw

New Delhi: India positions itself as a global hub for Artificial Intelligence as the country is expecting over 200 billion dollars investment across the five layers of AI stack. Announcing this during a press briefing at the India AI Impact Summit, Union Minister for IT Ashwini Vaishnaw said this investment is expected in the coming two years.

"Investment is coming in across the five layers of the AI stack. We have seen venture capital firms and other players committing funds to application developments and also for further research in cutting-edge models, because the next level of models will come from engineering innovation as well as mathematical innovation," the minister said.

He added that AI is impacting every sector and that difficulties in the AI ecosystem must be addressed through a techno-legal approach. "These (challenges) cannot be resolved merely through regulations or by passing a law alone," he said. On deepfakes, the minister stressed on the need for much stronger regulation.

"I think it is a problem which is growing day-by-day and certainly there is a need for protecting our children and society from these harms. We have initiated a dialogue with the industry," he told reporters here.

With many new plug-ins and AI tools coming in, there have been debates on the future of the IT services industry, and the minister said the industry is one of the biggest strengths and that the transition must be managed jointly by industry, academia and government. He also highlighted the need for reskilling and upskilling the existing workforce.

Vaishnaw also announced that the country will scale its compute capacity beyond the existing 38,000 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) with the addition of 20,000 GPUs in the coming weeks.

On the Semiconductor Mission, the minister said design will be the primary focus in Semiconductor 2.0. "We do believe that at least 50 deep-tech startups will emerge from our country in the coming years because of the efforts and innovation that are taking place here."

Addressing sustainability, Vaishnaw said investments in clean energy to power AI data centres and ongoing research to reduce power and water consumption. Emerging innovations indicate the potential to reduce AI infrastructure energy use by up to 35 per cent.

Also, several sovereign AI models by India have been tested and measured against multiple parameters. The minister said compared with global models, several Indian models have been rated better than many large international AI systems.