The Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Thursday approved the artificial intelligence (AI) Mission with an outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore for five years. Under the ‘India AI Mission’, private companies looking to set up AI computing capacity in the country will be subsidised through a fund. Seed funding will also be provided for AI start-ups.
The total allocation towards the AI Mission is Rs 10,371.92 crore. The approved corpus will be used to create a large computing infrastructure.
Union Minister Piyush Goyal, briefing reporters after the Cabinet meeting, said supercomputing capacity, comprising over 10,000 GPU, will be made available to various stakeholders for creating an AI ecosystem. Startups, academia, researchers and industry will be given access to the AI supercomputing infrastructure established under the India AI Mission, Goyal said.
A National Data Management Officer will be set up under the mission that will coordinate with various government departments and ministries to improve the quality of data and make them available for AI development and deployment.
Last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced the AI Mission. He said the goal of this mission is to establish adequate capacity of AI compute power in India. This will provide better facilities to the country’s start-ups and innovators. Under this mission, AI applications will be promoted in sectors like agriculture, healthcare, and education.
Under the AI Mission, the government will focus on four key areas covering AI research, funding start-ups working on designing bespoke chips for AI use cases, offering viability gap funding (VGF) for private companies looking to set up data centres in India for AI use cases, and also creating computing capacity within the government.
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