Ritu Jha–
India is on the cusp of a huge opportunity as AI pervades all sectors across the world, according to Jensen Huang, president and CEO, Nvidia, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of graphics processing units.
Huang shared his thoughts with indica on AI and India’s place in the global arena on the sidelines of the Indian Institute of Technology Bay Area Alumni (IITBAA) conference held at the Santa Clara Convention Center in California last weekend where he was the opening keynote speaker.
Huang told indica: “This is India’s decade owing to the geopolitical environment, the development. One of India’s great natural resources are its amazing IT professionals. And all of a sudden here comes Artificial Intelligence, which requires data, which India has an abundance of because of the last 10 years of 5G and digitalization, and the richness of the computer science ecosystem.”
He added: “With the appropriate AI infrastructure, I think that India could be one of the great exporters of AI. This is a phenomenal opportunity.”
Huang was in India in the first week of September when he met Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It was their second meeting. It lasted nearly 90 minutes.
Huang said he highlighted the need to invest in AI infrastructure the same way India invested in building its 5G. “Second, the desire and the need to reskill IT professionals into AI professionals. There is a large workforce of IT professionals in India. When it becomes reskilled into the largest AI workforce in India, that is going to create incredible opportunities,” Huang told indica.
A blog post by Nvidia said Huang’s meeting with Modi at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg — the prime minister’s official residence in New Delhi — took place as India was preparing to host a gathering of leaders from the G20, including US President Joe Biden.
“Had an excellent meeting with Mr. Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA,” Modi had said in a social media post. “We talked at length about the rich potential India offers in the world of AI.”
Following his meeting with Modi, Huang met with several dozen researchers from global powerhouses of science and technology, such as the Indian Institute of Science and the various campuses of the Indian Institutes of Technology, for an informal dinner.
The post said: “The attendees represented some of the top minds in fields as diverse as large language models, astrophysics, medicine, quantum computing, and natural language processing. The evening’s discussions ranged across topics from using technology to address language barriers, improve agriculture yields, bridge gaps in healthcare services, and transform digital economies, to addressing some of the grand scientific challenges of our time.”
Nvidia, now a $26 billion software and processing units giant, began its India operations in Bangalore (as it was known then) almost two decades ago. It now has four engineering development centers — in Gurugram, Hyderabad, Pune and Bengaluru.
On September 20, Indian tech major Infosys and Nvidia announced to expand their strategic collaboration with the aim to help enterprises worldwide drive productivity gains with generative AI applications and solutions. The alliance will bring the Nvidia AI Enterprise ecosystem of models, tools, runtimes and GPU systems to Infosys Topaz — an AI-first set of services, solutions and platforms that use generative AI technologies.
