New Delhi, Jan 30: The Indian government will soon begin hosting open-source models like DeepSeek on local servers, according to Information and Broadcasting Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who made the announcement on Thursday.
“We are going to do this very soon. The team has already worked out the details, such as the required servers and their capacity. All those details are in place, and we will soon begin hosting these open-source models on Indian servers,” said Vaishnaw.
This announcement comes at a time when the Chinese startup DeepSeek, with its open-source reasoning model R1, is challenging the idea that access to vast amounts of GPU power is necessary to build advanced AI models. The Indian government is also working on creating a portal that will allow startups and researchers to access GPUs at significantly reduced prices. This platform aims to make the highly sought-after GPUs more affordable for AI model training.
Vaishnaw further stated that the government will offer a 40% subsidy on common computing facilities for students, bringing the cost down to under Rs 100 per hour.
He mentioned that India currently has around 10,000 GPUs available, out of a total of 18,000, with 15,000 being high-end GPUs. The Minister noted that DeepSeek was trained using more than 2,000 GPUs, while ChatGPT was trained using about 25,000 GPUs. The technical partners involved in this AI initiative have already begun their investments and work.
“Our focus will be on using AI to solve population-scale problems, which is very important. A key pillar of the India AI mission will be developing applications that are useful for our people in areas like healthcare, education, agriculture, logistics, weather forecasting, flood forecasting, and glacier measurement—all of which affect large numbers of people,” the Minister added.
The Union government will continue to provide subsidies for AI computing power for the next four years.
Vaishnaw explained, “In its current form, we’ll be able to provide subsidies for the next four years, which is a sustainable period. As we continue to empower the ecosystem, we believe prices will significantly decrease below current levels.”
