Union Cabinet approves AI mission with capital outlay of Rs 10,372 crore
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. The approved corpus will be used to create a large computing infrastructure.
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FollowWith the objective of establishing a comprehensive ecosystem for the advancement of artificial intelligence in India, the Union Cabinet authorized the establishment of an AI Mission on Thursday, allocating over Rs 10,000 crore for its establishment. The mission's main goal will be to create an end-to-end framework, starting with the training of young people in the burgeoning sector and moving on to the establishment of innovation hubs and computing capacity.
Union Minister Piyush Goyal announced the Cabinet decisions, stating that Rs10,372 crore in capital expenditure has been allocated for the project, which aligns with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's aim of democratizing technology and making it accessible to every person.
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Following the Cabinet meeting, Union Minister Piyush Goyal briefed media on supercomputing capacity, stating that over 10,000 GPU will be made accessible to different stakeholders for the creation of an AI ecosystem. According to Goyal, the AI supercomputing infrastructure developed as part of the India AI Mission would be accessible to startups, academic institutions, researchers, and industry.
Under the goal, a National Data Management Officer would be established to work with different government ministries and agencies to enhance data quality and make it accessible for AI research and application.
The AI Mission was introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last year. According to him, the mission's objective is to provide India with a sufficient amount of AI computing power. This will give the nation's inventors and start-ups greater facilities. AI applications will be encouraged in industries including education, healthcare, and agriculture under this program.
The government will concentrate on four main areas under the AI Mission: AI research; financing start-ups that are developing custom chips for AI use cases; providing viability gap funding (VGF) to private companies that want to establish data centers in India for AI use cases; and expanding the government's computational capacity.
