The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) termed the participation as “exceptional” and said it will extend the deadline for submitting bids by two weeks from the date of publication of clarifications to the tender. It received around 500 suggestions on the tender from those attending the meeting, it said. MeitY Additional Secretary Abhishek Singh.
Representatives from Yotta, L&T, E2E, Tata Communications and Vigyanlabs, among others, were also present at the meeting.
Under the terms of the Request for Entry (RFE), companies must show the government a purchase order for 1,000 GPUs or have a stock of 1,000 GPUs to be eligible to bid.
Several questions were raised Global GPU Manufacturers, cloud service providers and data centre operators and MeitY have told them that it will take these points into consideration and issue a clarification, besides extending the deadline from the current September 6, people familiar with the matter said.
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“There is a lot of enthusiasm and interest in the AI Mission in India,” Singh said. “We have received a great response to the RFE. As is the process with any government tender, we will give two weeks from the date of publication of the clarification for companies to submit their bids. Companies have until Saturday (August 31), 5 pm, to submit their suggestions.”
One major concern was that RFE favors big business, especially the teraFLOPS specification, referring to computing power (a teraFLOPS equals one trillion floating point operations per second).
Singh said RFE is OEM-independent and both small and large players have been given equal opportunities.
“One of the suggestions made at the meeting was that there should be a category for startups and micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) that do not have prior experience to participate in the tender,” he said.
Companies participating in Thursday’s meeting told ET that if the government wants to facilitate 1,000 GPUs for startups, academia and research organisations under the India AI Mission, then even low-end GPUs that can handle smaller workloads should be included in the RFE, not just high-end and mid-range GPUs.
The companies said end users should have the choice between multiple GPUs and should not be limited to just one type. Singh said that choice will be available.
As per the scoring pattern mentioned in the RFE, if the average annual turnover for the last three years of a company is more than Rs 100 crore and less than Rs 150 crore, five points will be given to the bidder. For bidders with turnover greater than or equal to Rs 150 crore and less than Rs 200 crore, 15 points will be given. A turnover greater than or equal to Rs 200 crore will result in 25 points.
This may require smaller companies to partner with others, some attendees said.
Singh said the minimum billing requirements are based on the General Financial Regulations. Companies must have the financial strength and capacity to be able to implement projects of such complexity, he said.
“MeitY has published a visionary RFE for AI/GPU cloud service providers,” said Sunil Gupta, CEO of Yotta Data Services, which placed a purchase order for 16,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs and started operations with 4,000 H100 GPUs a few months ago. This will help grow the company’s AI ecosystem in India, making GPU capacity available in India in a cost-effective manner, he said.
Equally important is the way the framework for the panels has been structured, he said. This will encourage multiple service providers in the AI ecosystem such as data centres, cloud providers, managed service providers and system integrators to join hands, form consortia, invest in related infrastructure and make AI GPU computing capacity available to the Indian market, thereby expanding the ecosystem, he said.
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