India, Nvidia discuss sovereign GPU development, local manufacturing
Nvidia dominates the global GPU market with more than an 80% share, and its chips have seen soaring demand worldwide as companies and governments scale up investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw on Thursday said he held discussions with senior Nvidia officials on the development of a sovereign graphics processing unit (GPU) and the manufacturing of high-end data processing devices in India.
The talks also covered edge computing systems such as Nvidia’s DGX Spark, a compact AI device designed to deliver up to one petaFLOP of performance and support secure inferencing for models with as many as 200 billion parameters. Vaishnaw said the system can operate without an internet connection, making it suitable for use in sectors such as railways, shipping, healthcare, education and other remote applications.
Nvidia dominates the global GPU market with more than an 80% share, and its chips have seen soaring demand worldwide as companies and governments scale up investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Vaishnaw shared details of the meeting in a post on social media platform X, where he highlighted India’s interest in developing domestic GPU capabilities alongside the local manufacturing of advanced AI hardware.
Earlier this week, Nvidia at the CES trade show unveiled how the DGX Spark and DGX Station deskside AI supercomputers let developers harness the latest open and frontier AI models on a local deskside system, from 100-billion-parameter models on DGX Spark to 1-trillion-parameter models on DGX Station.
Vaishnaw had said in the first half of 2025 that India would develop its own Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) within the next 3 to 4 years.
The government is actively supporting the procurement of GPUs and subsidising their availability for developers of AI technology in the country.
From an initial target of 10,000 GPUs, India has deployed 38,000 GPUs under the India AI Mission. The government has made all GPUs available at a subsidised rate of Rs 65 per hour.
The government has selected twelve startups for the development of native AI engines. These are Sarvam AI, Soket AI, Gnani AI, Gan AI, Avaatar AI, IIT Bombay consortium–BharatGen, Zenteiq, Gen Loop, Intellihealth, Shodh AI, Fractal Analytics, Tech Mahindra Maker’s Lab.
Edited by Megha Reddy