The market experienced a surge in demand for NVIDIA’s GPUs, leading to a supply shortage and putting immense pressure on the market. Chinese buyers had to resort to sourcing GPUs from the black market due to US government restrictions on direct sales to China.
To address the accessibility of GPUs in India, Tata Communications partnered with NVIDIA to establish a large-scale AI cloud infrastructure for customers in both the private and public sectors.
The partnership between Tata Communications and NVIDIA goes beyond infrastructure to include best practices like implementing high-speed low-latency InfiniBand networks.
Formerly known as Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL), Tata Communications has evolved significantly over the years, expanding its services to include managed cloud services, microservices, connected solutions, content delivery networks, and analytics.
Now focusing on leading the AI revolution in India, Tata Communications aims to stay at the forefront of technological advancement.
AI marketplace
Tata Communications plans to create a marketplace where enterprises can access foundational models and AI tools to simplify the building and deployment of generative AI applications.
Rajesh Awasthi, Vice President & Business Head of Cloud & Hosting Services at Tata Communications, mentioned that the partnership with NVIDIA aims to create an AI cloud platform that transcends the infrastructure layer.
The marketplace is akin to Bedrock, a service by Amazon Web Services that streamlines generative AI application creation and deployment on the cloud.
The platform is expected to go live in the second half of the year. Tata Group has also collaborated with NVIDIA to develop an AI supercomputer using the next-generation NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip.
Tata’s AI strategy
Tata Communications anticipates a multitude of AI use cases to emerge from both the public sector and enterprises. With 44 data centers globally and a network of Point of Presence (PoP) for content delivery, Tata Communications aims to provide a centralized unit for customers to handle tasks like training large language models (LLMs) and fine-tuning.
The inferencing platform may be decentralized, with inferencing occurring near the customer’s location using Tata Communications’ PoP network in the country.
Additionally, Tata Communications sees great demand for its AI platform and infrastructure from the government of India, having already migrated the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s workload to the cloud.
Catering to the public sector
Tata Communications has a government community cloud hosting mission-critical projects from various ministries and departments of the Government of India. Projects like Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission and Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana 1.0 have been deployed on Tata Communications’ cloud platform.
Looking ahead, the Tata Communications AI platform can support public sector initiatives like Bhashini, aimed at using AI to break language barriers within the country.
Part of IndiaAI Mission
The Indian government’s IndiaAI Mission plans to develop an AI compute infrastructure with 10,000 or more GPUs through public-private partnerships. Tata Communications is in talks with the government to be part of this initiative in collaboration with NVIDIA.
