India, Aug. 4 -- Compute take over 40 per cent of the IndiaAI budget. It is the one input the world was always going to make cheap for us

Think of building an artificial intelligence system as cooking a meal.

You need two things. A stove, and ingredients.

The stove is computing power - the specialised chips, called GPUs, that do the arithmetic. The ingredients are data: the text, speech, images and records that the machine learns from. Without the stove, nothing cooks. Without ingredients, there is nothing to cook.

India's national AI programme, the IndiaAI Mission, was approved by the Cabinet in March 2024 with an outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore over five years. It has seven pillars. It has bought a great many stoves. More than 38,000 G...