Race Heats Up: 7 Firms Make the Cut in MeitY’s AI GPU Tender Round 2

According to media sources, the IndiaAI Mission has selected seven businesses for technical review under the second phase of the graphics processing units (GPU) tender, including partners of Google Cloud, Oracle, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The companies Cyfuture India, Sify Digital Services, Vensysco Technologies, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Yotta Data Services, Ishan Infotech, and Netmagic IT Services (now NTT Global Data Centres & Cloud Infrastructure India, or NTT GDC India) have been invited by the Mission to present their technical proposals on May 14.

MeitY Expects 15,000 GPUs

In this round, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) anticipates receiving 15,000 GPUs. Locuz and Vensysco affirmed their partnership with AWS.

Although the specifics of their collaboration for this proposal are unknown, Ishan Infotech is an Oracle partner and NTT-Netmagic is a Google Cloud partner in India. Appsquadz Software and AWS will be Vensysco's consortium partners, according to Vikash Kumar Dubey, managing director of Vensysco Technologies.

Vensysco will provide 2,300 GPUs, including 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs, 100 AWS Trainium 1 GPUs, and 2,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. In addition, it is providing 1,300 more GPUs this time around than it did the last time, which was 1,000.

One of the five lowest (L1) bidders in the initial round was Locuz, which is currently owned by SHI International, a US IT infrastructure company.

Yotta and Vensysco Emerged as L2 Bidders

Among others, Yotta and Vensysco have been L2 bidders in the first round. Similar offers of 1,000 GPUs, comprising 700 Nvidia H100 GPUs, 200 AWS Inferentia 2 GPUs, and 100 AWS Trainium 1 GPUs, were made by Locuz and Vensysco in that round.

Cyfuture India's CEO, Anuj Bairathi, informed a news outlet that the company has placed purchase orders for 1,184 GPUs. These consist of AMD's MI300 and MI325 GPUs, Intel's Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 GPUs, and Nvidia's H100, L40S, and A100 GPUs. Cyfuture, a cloud service provider with MeitY panels, developed Cyfuture.ai, a fully integrated AI platform.

Technically, the business was not eligible for the GPU tender's first round. ET's queries for responses from IndiaAI, NTT GDC India, Google Cloud, Sify, Yotta, Ishan, and Oracle were not answered. In order to preserve its leadership in AI and national security, nations like the US have placed export limits on modern AI chips, particularly GPUs, making them a highly sought-after resource globally.

 In January, India formally began its INR 10,000-crore India AI Mission, in which empanelled bidders offered 14,517 GPUs at L1 prices, falling short of the 10,000 GPU threshold specified in the IndiaAI compute pillar.

As part of the mission, the government is also providing investment funding and other forms of support to academia and industry to encourage the development of local language models. The goal of the action is to increase India's AI capabilities.