Mumbai: Nvidia’s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, announced that Nvidia is partnering with Reliance Industries to develop artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in India during his discussion with Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) CMD Mukesh Ambani at the Nvidia AI Summit. In the conversation, RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani stated that “India will be one of the biggest intelligence markets.”

In a fireside chat between the two businessmen, Huang said, “Mukesh, it is such an honor and such a great privilege and incredible joy to be able to contribute in this way. And as you know, the IT industry of India is world renowned for its very large scale, and not just in size, but in deep expertise of computer science. Very few countries in the world has this natural resource, this amazing natural resource called IT and computer science expertise. In the last couple of years, we’ve been working together to upskill and we’ve now upskilled about 200,000 IT professionals into the world of AI. What do we have to do together? And how can we work together to help transform India at the speed of light, really? Because everything is moving so fast to transform India into a center, not of just IT, but a center of AI.

Whil sharing his own experience in India, Ambani said, “First, as our Prime Minister has said, that this is a new aspirational India. What we have today is we are among the only country in the world where the average age of 1.4 billion Indians is below 35. So, what is driving our economy is not only new technology like AI, but also aspirations.”

“And I believe that, you know, the Prime Minister and I believe that his leadership in terms of converting India to a premier digital society has been vital and continues to drive activity at the ground level. So, it’s demography, it’s leadership.”

“The third factor is that we as Indians have the raw talent. You talked about converting 200,000 people into this, but I believe there are millions. If we now see, India has become home among all the companies across the world. We are. Our fastest growing industry is global competency centers. So, we do space research in India. We do pharmaceutical research in India. I am sure that you are thinking of building chips in India. We are in our own energy industry. We do bioenergy industry. All the energy majors, Shell, BP, actually do their innovation in India. So, India is fast becoming an innovation hub for the world in terms of where we are and not the manufacturer.”

Ambani further stated that apart from the US and China, India has the best digital connectivity infrastructure, 4G, 5G and broadband in the world. “When people talk about Jio, and, you know, we said Jio took India from No. 158 in the world to No. 1 in the world in eight years. We, as a single company, didn’t know anything about this domain. But today, we are the largest data company in the world. Our volumes are equivalent to AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon combined,” he said.

When asked by Jensen whether Reliance encourages its customers to use their phones, Ambani said, “We do. And what really that means, Jensen, is a perpetual value that technology has delivered customer value of between $ 500 and $ 700 billion a year, year on year, every year, to Indians. And this is the gift of technology to the people of India. And this is what you described as intelligence we can do to actually bring prosperity to all the people and bring equality to the world.”

Announcing the partnership, Jensen said, “As you know, in order to lead an artificial intelligence, you need to have AI model technology that India has. You need to have data, massive quantities of data. The last thing you need is AI infrastructure. And we’re announcing that Reliance and Nvidia are partnering to build AI infrastructure here in India.”

Talking about his meeting with PM Modi , Jensen said, “The thing that I really love, and when I met Modi ji, the first time he asked me to meet his cabinet was to, this has got to be about six years ago. He asked me to address this cabinet about Artificial Intelligence. And I was so surprised. It was literally the first time any government leader, any national leader asked me to address his cabinet on this particular topic. It was long before anybody was talking about Artificial Intelligence. And my last visit with him, he said this, and it was really quite profound. He said. I was explaining to him the concept of AI infrastructure and why it’s essential for every nation to have their own AI infrastructure, like their own communication, their Internet infrastructure, their roads, energy. Of course. And of course, intelligence should be part of your infrastructure, and the manufacturing of intelligence should be part of your infrastructure. And he said this, he said, makes complete sense that India should manufacture its own AI. Manufacture your own AI. You should not outsource, you should not export data to import intelligence, that India should not export data to import intelligence. And he said, it’s like, Modi ji said, India should not just export flour to import bread. We should add value to the data ourselves. And the partnership that we have is to start that journey to build the underlying infrastructure so that India could have your own infrastructure. You surely have your own computer science expertise, and you also have your data, you have a giant population of users to drive that flywheel.”

“And then one more comment. This is the thing that he was most inspired by six years ago. He said that Artificial Intelligence has the ability to elevate the entire population of India. And the reason for that, I was talking earlier to him about the fact that there are so few people in the world who knows how to program a computer. Programming is not easy. Here in India, it’s the largest population of any programmers in the world. However, still, programming is not easy. Most people don’t know how to program Python or C++ or, you know, Pascal or Fortran or Java, but everyone knows how to program an intelligence. And so, the ability to program computers is available to a small population. But the. The ability to program AI is something that everyone can do. And if AI could be put into the hands of every citizen, it would elevate and put into the hands of everyone. This incredible capability you and I get the benefit from called computers. And this computer could now benefit everybody in society. He explained that back to me”

To which Ambani said, “Absolutely. And I think that that is why I started by saying that we are very fortunate to have a visionary leader who believes not only in vision, but in execution. And you know, Jensen, where I see our partnership and is really, in a sense, I was waiting for your GB 200’s to mature, because like you from first principles, I don’t like doing anything but the best technology. And now your GB 200 is undoubtedly the best technology.

“I have again, great respect for my friend Mark Zuckerberg, because by bringing open source to the world of intelligence, he has given everybody the opportunity to participate in this revolution said Ambani while expressing his admiration for Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“And to my mind, this move of Mark will be written in the history, right, when we look at it a hundred years from now, that open source, all the big things in the world have, have helped an open source like Linux was open source. And I think that at least from an India point of view, we can use Llama as a base model. It allows all of us to develop on top of a state-of-the-art model… And I am sure that there is somebody in this audience who is very bright and very young, and we will have into the future an Indian model, as you very rightly said, which might be 10X of Llama. And that will happen from India,” the RIL CMD said.

In September 2022, Reliance and Nvidia pledged to create AI supercomputers in India and develop large language models tailored to Indian languages. Later that year, Nvidia announced a similar partnership with Tata Group. DeshGujarat