Nvidia doubles down on India with Hindi language model and major partnerships

Nvidia on Thursday announced a slew of partnerships with major Indian firms and launched a Hindi language model, as the American chip company looks to ramp up business in one of the world's biggest technology markets.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke about the firm's tech and efforts in India at its AI Summit in Mumbai — an event that featured Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar and India's richest person Mukesh Ambani, the chair of Reliance Industries.

Amid the flurry of partnerships announced on the occasion was a deal between Reliance and Nvidia to build AI infrastructure in India. Huang said that Nvidia is working with companies including Yotta and Tata Communications to also build computing infrastructure. Huang said that by the end of the year, India will have "20 times more compute" than just over a year ago, referring to the country's computing power.

"India used to be a country that produced software. [India] exported software. In the future, India is going to export AI," Huang said.

Nvidia also announced Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi 4B — a small language model in Hindi, the widest-spoken of India's multitude of languages. Companies running Nvidia hardware can deploy this language model, while Indian IT consultancy Tech Mahindra is using Nvidia's model to launch its own Hindi AI model, Project Indus 2.0.

Small language models are trained on much more compact and specific datasets compared to large language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4. 

Nvidia is also collaborating with other major Indian IT companies like Infosys, Wipro and TCS to train around 500,000 developers in creating and implementing AI agents with its software.

Nvidia's ramp-up in India takes place as the company looks to find new regions to boost business, while the breakneck speed growth it has experienced over the last year and a half begins to slow down.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been looking to lure in major foreign technology companies, particularly in the semiconductor industry, to increase investment in the country.

India aims to establish itself as a major player in the semiconductor industry, as it strives for self-sufficiency in manufacturing. Modi has outlined various objectives to advance the semiconductor sector, setting a significant target to grow the country's electronics industry from its current value of around $155 billion to $500 billion by 2030.

"India is very, very dear to the world's computer industry, central to the IT industry," Huang said.

Ambani's presence at the Nvidia event also highlighted his conglomerate's ambition to become a leading AI player in India. Reliance Jio, the telecommunications firm under Ambani's Reliance Industries and an upstart less than a decade ago, is now India's biggest mobile provider.

"Jio aims to build large scale AI infrastructure to democratize AI leveraging data emanating from almost a billion Internet users in next few years. With this planned investments and scale, Jio aims to be the flag bearer of proliferating AI adoption from consumers to enterprises to government," Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

This "unlocks significant opportunity" for Nvidia and other companies, Shah added.