India’s government has laid out fresh details on how it is channeling support toward domestic AI development. In a written reply to the Lok Sabha, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said the IndiaAI Mission has identified 20 indigenous foundation model proposals for backing and cleared 237 projects for subsidised AI compute support.
On the scale of support, the 20 selected proposals split into 12 Large Multimodal Models and eight Small Language Models, with applicants retaining full intellectual property rights over their work. On the compute side, 15 Compute Service Providers have been empanelled, and the 237 approved projects have been sanctioned a combined 93.18 lakh (roughly 9.3 million) GPU hours. A purchase order has also gone out for a high-performance AI computing system of about 1.1 EFLOPS to be installed at the NIC Data Centre in Shastri Park, Delhi.
On eligibility and results so far, several outputs have already reached market: Sarvam AI’s 30-billion and 105-billion parameter models and its Indus model, Gnani.AI’s speech-to-speech system, BharatGen’s multilingual foundation models, and Avataar AI’s video-generation model.
On process, 11 national-level hackathons and innovation challenges have produced 62 AI prototypes, of which 20 have been deployed across public-sector institutions. Separately, 58 AI Centres of Excellence have been approved nationwide, with 22 of them already established and operating across 13 states and Union Territories.
On broader utilisation, the government noted parallel progress under the Semicon India Programme, where 12 semiconductor manufacturing projects — representing a combined committed investment of roughly Rs 1.64 lakh crore — have been approved, three of which have already begun commercial production. Officials framed the combined push as an effort to cut reliance on foreign technology while building self-reliant compute, foundation-model, and research capacity at home. For context, Stanford’s Global AI Vibrancy Report, published in November 2025, ranked India third globally in AI competitiveness and ecosystem vibrancy, and second-largest contributor to AI projects on GitHub.
