India’s technology professionals are emerging to be the “front-office” of the world’s artificial intelligence (AI) revolution by reskilling themselves with AI-native skills, Jensen Huang, chief executive of leading AI chips maker Nvidia, said.
“India has the largest population of IT professionals… There is no question they will be reskilled for AI,” Huang said. “When I speak with the leaders in India, it is clear to them this is one of the greatest opportunities for them (India’s engineers) to reskill themselves and instead of IT of the back-room of companies, they will now become the IT of the front-room of the companies where value is created,” Huang said in response to ET’s question at a press briefing here.
He said his conversations with Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlight India’s need to become a part of AI value addition rather than just exporting India’s data to train super-sized large language models.
“He (Modi) said to me, Jensen, India should not export flour to import bread. This makes perfect sense. Why export the raw material to import the value add? Why export the data of India, so that you can import AI?” Huang said.
“AI is used for engineering, marketing, sales, finance, business operations…all of that in the front office, not back office. I think that’s where the largest market opportunity lies and I think it (Modi’s plan) is absolutely brilliant. I’m very excited about it,” he said.
When asked about whether Nvidia is part of the Indian government’s commitment to import 10,000 graphic processing units (GPUs), Huang jokingly said he’s “open for business”. “We’re very interested in it. If somebody would like to buy some GPUs, I’m open for business. Tell everybody, spread the word, Nvidia’s open for business,” he said.
Nvidia is a major player in the global GPU market with leadership in technology sectors such as AI and gaming. The AI superchip maker on Monday announced its most powerful Blackwell GPU chip, capable of processing trillion-parameter AI models up to 30 times faster and at one-fourth use of power compared to its predecessor. The Blackwell chips are set to be used by Amazon Web Services, Dell Technologies, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, Tesla and xAI among others.
They will also power sovereign AI clouds including India’s Shakti Cloud offering by the Hiranandani group’s data centre arm Yotta Data Services, which localises end-to-end data storage requirements of governments and enterprises.
Reliance Industries and Netweb Technologies are also known to have collaborated with Nvidia to build and install GPU-based servers in India.
By Himanshi Lohchab
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/epaper/delhicapital/2024/mar/21/disruption-startups-tech/indian-it-pros-to-be-front-office-of-ai-revolution-nvidia/articleshow/108658358.cms
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