India's Jio AI Mission GPU L1 bidders to receive initial workload assignments by mid-April.

Ten technically qualified empanelled bidders have offered 14,517 GPUs at L1 rates against the tender for 10,000 GPUs through India's AI Mission. Companies including Reliance Jio, E2E, NxtGen, Locuz and CtrlS emerged as the lowest price (L1) bidders and will have AI workloads assigned by the second week of April, according to IndiaAI Mission chief executive Abhishek Singh. Some L1 bidders have already integrated with the AI Compute portal launched on March 6. None of the current L1 bidders offer Nvidia's B200 GPUs currently, though Singh noted that "The Blackwells (Nvidia's B200 GPUs) may come in."

The IndiaAI Mission operates under a continuous empanelment process that renews quarterly, inviting fresh proposals to discover revised rates. The last date for filing applications in the second round is April 30, with evaluations to begin next month. A pre-bid meeting held on March 26 received a strong response, with Singh stating: "IndiaAI is expecting a lot of companies which missed out in the first round to come in." AS Rajgopal, chief executive of NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies, said the company's portal integration would be completed by April 14, and the company will be offering H200 GPUs along with other GPU models.

Nvidia H100 GPUs comprise 69 percent of the total GPUs offered. E2E has emerged as the L1 bidder for H100 with 716 committed GPUs, while Yotta Data Services is the L2 bidder with 8,192 GPUs. Once E2E exhausts its committed capacity, Yotta will be assigned the next AI workloads as per RFE guidelines. Yotta offered as many as 9,216 GPUs total but has not emerged as an L1 bidder for any of the 30 GPU models. Sources from E2E Networks indicated it would take at least a month to assess market uptake of particular GPU models.

Umesh Shah, director of Orient Technologies, one of ten technically qualified bidders proposing to offer 1,000 GPUs, told ET: "Given the rapidly growing demand for AI-driven solutions, we anticipate early indicators of market uptake within the next few months." He added that adoption will depend on factors such as ease of access, cost-effectiveness, and enterprises' ability to integrate resources into their AI workloads, estimating that "A reasonable timeframe to assess broader industry impact would be within two quarters, as businesses experiment, benchmark performance, and scale their AI initiatives." Anuj Bairathi, chief executive of Cyfuture India, which did not qualify technically in the first round, raised concerns about concentration on Nvidia when alternatives like ASIC-based Sambanova and Cerebras are available. He also warned that public L1 pricing could trigger pricing wars, stating: "Once the new player becomes L1, the capacity of this new vendor will be consumed first, sparking price wars which is not good for the industry."

The IndiaAI Application Development Initiative has received 900 applications for support in developing AI solutions, with 30 shortlisted across three maturity stages: idea, prototype, and existing solutions. Teams in the initial stage were awarded Rs 5 lakh each on March 6, with some receiving Rs 25 lakh to further develop their prototypes. According to Singh, winners will have the opportunity to deploy solutions in government and receive funding of up to Rs 1 crore: "We are working with the concerned departments to scale them up. Ultimately, they will have to adopt it, and the solution will be further developed, deployed and taken to maturity. And those solutions which reach that level, will get a reward of Rs 1 crore. It will take three to six months for this process."