Ola Krutrim to launch India’s first AI chips by 2026

Krutrim, the AI venture of Ola, will design and develop India’s first AI silicon chips by 2026, specifically designed to manage complex AI tasks and workloads.

This is part of the firm's efforts to strengthen its full-stack AI capabilities, which include foundational models, cloud, and silicon.

“We in India and we in the world actually are living in such a changing, transformative time. This is the time of AI, This is the time of the future of compute. And India needs to build its own AI stack,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder of Ola, at Sankalp 2024, the company’s flagship event, at Ola Futurefactory in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu. 

The initial family of chips comprises Bodhi for AI, Sarv for general computing, and Ojas for edge computing. 

The chips will enable development of faster and more efficient AI systems and mark a milestone in achieving India’s technological sovereignty, said a release from the company.

The company plans to release Bodhi 2 by 2028, which will be trained on over 10 trillion parameters and scalable to exascale supercomputing. 

Exascale systems are supercomputers that can process information significantly faster than today’s most advanced supercomputers.

To support these advancements, the firm plans to scale its data centre capacity to 1 GW by 2028. Additionally, it has partnered with global leaders like Arm and Untether AI for the development of its CPU and AI chips.

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“Today’s announcement and demonstration begins our partnership with Ola-Krutrim to build upon the world-class performance and energy efficiency in AI inference that Untether AI provides. We are gratified to be working in close collaboration with Ola-Krutrim’s hardware and software engineering teams to develop next generation AI acceleration solutions utilising the capability of our At-Memory speedAI architecture,” said Chris Walker, CEO of Toronto-based Untether AI. 

The company has also launched Krutrim Cloud with AI and general-purpose capabilities, along with a variety of purpose-built AI services aimed at helping the Indian developer community build technology applications more affordably.

Krutrim AI will be available on Ola Electric and Ola Cabs to improve user experience. 

Currently, over 25,000 developers are using Krutrim Cloud and 250 billion API calls have been made across products since its launch in early 2024, said the release.

Furthermore, the company has introduced over 50 new services on Krutrim Cloud. Among these are Bhashik, a language hub with multimodal translation capabilities across text, voice, and video, and Customer Experience AI, which features multimodal AI agents for enterprises that operate across mobile apps.

(Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory, is an independent director in Ola Electric)