New Delhi: India will host Chinese startup DeepSeek‘s AI models on its servers to check for security and other safety parameters, govt said on Thursday, as it intensified efforts to provide compute to startups and researchers to hasten work on developing localised AI ‘foundational models’ or tech solutions as the country looks to counter advances made in the US, and now China, in AI.
IT and electronics minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said govt is procuring as many 18,693 graphics processing units (GPU) that will be used to provide the much-needed “affordable compute” facility to large as well as emerging tech companies and researchers working in the area of AI.
Foundation models are a type of AI solution trained on vast datasets to perform a wide range of tasks. The models are designed to adapt and can be further fine-tuned for specific applications making them versatile.
Vaishnaw said the number of high-tech GPUs being procured – as part of the Rs 10,372 crore IndiaAI mission – are sufficient for now to power India’s AI quest, pointing out that DeepSeek was built with around 2,000 GPUs.
Dismissing apprehensions over India being late in its AI quest, he said, being a trusted partner, it enjoys the support of countries such as the US. “We are well in time. The most important thing is getting the compute facility. And this is now being made available. We are in very good shape. Getting the compute facility was very, very, very critical to the mission.”
He said India is confident of a regular supply of GPUs by companies such as Nvidia, despite restrictions by the US govt against certain countries. “I’m reiterating that we are seen as a trusted country, we’re seen as a country which respects IP rights, (and) we’re seen as a country which understands the technological development prospects and all the points related to that.”
The recent surge in interest in DeepSeek has not got the govt worried. “The good thing is that DeepSeek is an open source model and we are very soon going to actually host it on Indian servers – the way we have hosted (Meta’s) Llama. Everything which is open source can be taken and hosted on our servers so that the data privacy parameters can be addressed. That we are going to do very soon,” he said.
Vaishnaw said preparatory work has been initiated for this. “The team has worked out the details on how many servers are required, how much capacity is required.”
Ministry officials told TOI that the testing around security aspects will be done by multiple agencies, which will include cyber security watchdog CERT-In and those in the security establishments such as National Cyber Security Secretariat.