DeepSeek to be hosted on Indian servers soon to address data privacy concerns: Vaishnaw

The government on Thursday said DeepSeek, an open-source model, will soon be hosted on Indian servers to address data security and privacy concerns over the Chinese AI platform.

Chinese company DeepSeek made headlines after its AI model R1 overtook ChatGPT as the top-ranked free app on Apple’s Appstore, challenging the AI dominance concentrated so far with the US firms, particularly Silicon Valley frontrunner Open AI.

AI chipmaker and Wall Street superstar Nvidia shed $590 billion in market capitalisation on Monday, suffering the single greatest one-day value wipeout of any firm in history.

Critics, however, have raised concerns about data security and privacy as DeepSeek is based in China.

On Thursday, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw asserted that every app or system, which needs to be tested on security parameters will be tested, and decisions will be taken.

"The good thing is that Deepseek is an open-source model, and we are very soon going to host DeepSeek on Indian servers, the way we have hosted Llama (large language model/generative AI model developed by Meta AI) on India servers.

"Everything that is open source can be taken and hosted on our server so data privacy parameters can be addressed, and that we are going to do soon," the minister said.

Already, teams have worked out the nitty-gritty—details of how many servers are required, how much capacity would be needed, et al.

"...all those details have been worked out by the team and we will be hosting those open-source models on Indian servers. That will address concerns regarding privacy of data," Vaishnaw said.