AI mission: Govt tweaks tender norms to allow low-cost GPUs

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has tweaked tender norms in a bid to allow the use of low-cost graphic processing units (GPUs) under the Rs 10,000-crore Artificial Intelligence (AI) mission, according to people in the know.

The move is significant as the specifications of compute units under the earlier tender would have restricted bidders from procuring Nvidia GPUs like A100, H100, and Blackwell B200, among others, which are used for high-end training of large AI models. It would have also largely restricted compute units of other companies such as AMD, and even low-cost options from Nvidia, industry experts said.