UAE company G42 partners with Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of computing in India

Abu Dhabi-based technology company G42 has partnered with US-based chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of computing power across a new supercomputer system in India, the two companies said on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.

The system will be hosted in India and will follow local database, security and compliance rules. The project aims to provide computing resources for artificial intelligence applications for educational institutions, government agencies, and small and medium enterprises.

“Sovereign AI infrastructure has become essential for national competitiveness. This project brings this capability to India at the national level, enabling researchers, innovators and local companies to become local in AI while maintaining complete data sovereignty and security,” Manu Jain, CEO, G42 India, said in a statement.

The Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) in Abu Dhabi and the Indian Center for the Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) are also part of the project. Last year, MBZUAI and G42 launched the Nanda 87B, a large Indo-English language model based on Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B model, which claims to understand informal speech in Hindi and English.

“The deployment of this system in India represents a significant step forward in the country’s computational capabilities and sovereign AI initiatives,” said Andy Hook, chief strategy officer at Cerebras. “It will accelerate the training and inference of large-scale models, enabling researchers and developers to build AI tailored to India’s needs.”

This week’s India AI Impact Summit saw the launch of several AI infrastructure initiatives by Indian corporate giants and international companies.

India’s Adani Group has pledged $100 billion to build up to 5 gigawatts of data center capacity in the country by 2035. Reliance also said it will invest $110 billion over the next seven years to set up gigawatt-sized data centers.

OpenAI has collaborated with the Tata Group to secure 100 MW of AI computing in the country as part of its Stargate project, eventually scaling it up to 1 GW. Indian Technology Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the summit that the country plans to attract more than $200 billion in infrastructure investment over the next two years by rolling out a mix of tax incentives, state-backed venture capital, and policy support.

So far, US tech giants, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have allocated about $70 billion to expand the country’s artificial intelligence and cloud infrastructure.