Bengaluru/New Delhi, Aug. 31 -- In October 1985, the United States refused to allow the sale of a supercomputer to India fearing the government may use it for progressing nuclear research and building strategic defence resources. Pushed to a corner, India created the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-Dac) in March 1988 with the singular purpose of building an advanced supercomputer as quickly as it could. By August 1991, C-Dac had built Param-8000-India's first supercomputer.

India found itself in similar circumstances last year. In January 2025, the US decided to regulate global access to Nvidia Corp.'s high-performance computing chips. India was grouped along with Israel, Singapore and a few other countries on a list allo...