Microsoft-backed G42 to build India’s largest supercomputer with 8 exaflop power

Microsoft and Mubadala-backed G42 will build India’s largest supercomputer with eight exaflops, which can perform millions of trillion floating-point operations per second, a senior company official said on Tuesday.

G42 India CEO Manu Jain told PTI that the company also unveiled a beta version of Hindi language large language model — an artificial intelligence engine, with which users can converse in Hindi, English and Hinglish (mix of Hindi and English) language.

He said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had visited Abu Dhabi earlier this year and a memorandum of understanding on digital infrastructure was signed between India and the UAE.

“We are the chosen implementation partner to execute this MoU. The MoU had spoken about three things – setting up a very large 2 gigawatt data centre in India. This can double the existing capacity of data centres in India. The second is building one of India’s largest supercomputers up to 8 exaflops which we (G42) are building with Cerebras, and third was co-developing AI models in India,” Jain said.

He, however, did not mention the timeline for setting up the data centre and supercomputer.

“We are very thrilled that today we have launched Nanda, the Hindi large language model. The name of the LLM has been derived from India’s top mountain peak,” Jain said.

He said NANDA has been trained on a 13-billion parameter model trained on approximately 2.13 trillion tokens of language datasets, including Hindi.

“With NANDA, we are heralding a new era of AI inclusivity, ensuring that the rich heritage and depth of Hindi language is represented in the digital and AI landscape. NANDA exemplifies G42’s unwavering commitment to excellence and fostering equitable AI,” G242 group company Inception’s Acting CEO Andrew Jackson said.