Mint Quick Edit | A Reliance-Nvidia tie-up brightens India’s AI success odds

If data could be called the “new oil”, what might artificial intelligence (AI) be? And what digital infrastructure would it take? As the world’s dominant maker of AI-suited chips, Nvidia, joins hands with Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries to set up top-end compute capacity, India’s prospects of catching up with the advanced world in AI have brightened. 

Globally, Nvidia’s chips are highly prized. This is all the more so because AI and its enablers are strategic sectors in the context of global geopolitics. On Thursday, the chipmaker’s chief executive officer Jensen Huang said a “seismic change” is underway with compute capacities in India set to grow 20 times this year. 

Also read: Reliance-NVIDIA partnership: Mukesh Ambani says ’India will be biggest intelligence market to build AI-infra’

This raises optimism over the technology curve that India aspires to ascend. Our information technology prowess, many believe, needs to be deployed on indigenous AI development, given the role AI is expected to play in economic growth as much as military sophistication over the next few decades. 

A tie-up with Meta Platforms was a big move by Reliance on the data-centre front. The group’s pact with Nvidia, only sketchy details of which are available at this juncture, could potentially prove more rewarding.