75% of India’s AI infrastructure relies on global supply chain: Red Hat’s Navtez Bal

Red Hat, the American technology multinational that provides open-source software for hybrid clouds, edge computing, and artificial intelligence (AI), said that nearly 75% of India’s AI infrastructure depends on global supply chains or platforms, and building a model as a service based on open architecture would lead to operational freedom.

“75% of India’s AI infrastructure relies on global supply chains or platforms. Indian AI infrastructure faces challenges achieving sovereign and operational freedom. Companies can gain visibility by eliminating black box dependencies in AI models,” Navtez Singh Bal, vice president & general manager (India & South Asia), Red Hat, told ET.

Further, the top executive said that enterprises should look at modernising legacy apps without vendor friction. He added that the company sees the India market as a potential opportunity, focusing on sovereign AI and virtualisation, as well as driving innovation through its core portfolio.

From a sovereign point of view, the shift is toward operational freedom on the architectural side, he added.

Some of the company’s top customers, according to him, are leveraging the Red Hat stack to build model-as-a-service or GPU-as-a-service within their organisations.

“You will be able to take models from anywhere. Models are available now. Even Nvidia itself will be putting open-source models on the market, as it doesn’t want a closed architecture. So models will come. This technology of how to make a model is out of the bag now,” Bal said.

Recently, IBM and Red Hat launched Project Lightwell, backed by a $5 billion fund, to find and fix vulnerabilities in open-source software at an industrial scale.

In 2019, IBM completed its mega $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat to leverage open-source technologies and secure a dominant footprint across multi-cloud environments.

To deliver this trust infrastructure, Lightwell, according to IBM’s statement, leverages the high-throughput capability of a generative AI-powered remediation engine that is already live and operating at scale.

“This advanced, AI-driven automation pipeline combines frontier and open AI models with human engineering expertise to identify, validate, and remediate vulnerabilities across critical dependencies embedded deep within modern software architectures,” it said earlier.