Discussed rich potential of AI with PM Modi: NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang

Huang said his discussions with PM Modi covered acceleration of building AI infra in India, the need to upskill and primarily reskill every single engineer to be an AI engineer in the future (including NVIDIA’s own talent pool), and NVIDIA would like to partner with companies in India, reported Moneycontrol.

The company would also reskill the IT workforce in India to make it the largest AI workforce in the world, he said.

“I would like to accelerate the building of AI infrastructure here in India. You have your own data, lots and lots of data. You also have very diverse languages. Your diverse languages and population have diverse needs, different from the rest of the world.

“You have a local market, you have all of your own data. You have the great talent of computer scientists. You produce more computer scientists than any country on the planet. Your infrastructure for producing computer scientists is actual intelligence. You produce world-class computer scientists at scale,” Huang said, the report stated.

He emphasised on the idea of creating a new type of infrastructure that upgrades data into intelligence, and Huang stressed India doesn’t need to outsource that task.

“We should build it here. Train it here. Produce AI here. You have everything you need. Everything you need to build the AI and use the AI here in India, but you need to have infrastructure. This is now the production of intelligence,” he said.

In future, It is likely that one of India's largest exports will be the AI it produces, NVDIA chief said.

“You will export more AI expertise than any country in the world. It potentially could be your largest export,” Huang said, according to the report.

He underscored that artificial intelligence will close the technology divide.

“India has invested with so much vision in building the 5G infrastructure, and because everyone has access to a phone, on the other side of the phone is going to be an AI in the future. Whatever that villager would like to do, or a farmer would like to do what anybody would like to do. You just ask your phone, and your phone will perform the task for you. We have closed the technology divided. And he [PM Modi] is so happy to hear that.

NVIDIA has development centres at Gurugram, Hyderabad, Pune and Bengaluru in India with over 3,800 employees.

Of this, a little more than 2,200 employees are based in Bengaluru, India’s Silicon Valley.

Huang said the number of employees in India could be doubled or tripled but did not specify a time frame.

Huang also supported the idea of India having AI sovereignty as the country itself has sovereign needs, according to the report.

“The country itself has sovereign needs. It has data that the country needs to process and wants to process. It has national security reasons maybe. It needs to advance the infrastructure, irrespective of the profitability of companies,” he said.