India to host DeepSeek on its servers soon: Ashwini Vaishnaw on privacy concerns

India will host Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek on Indian servers to address data privacy concerns, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Thursday.

"It is an open-source model. Like Llama, which is open source, this too can be hosted on Indian servers. Data privacy issues regarding DeepSeek can be addressed by hosting open-source models on Indian servers," Moneycontrol quoted Vaishnaw as saying.

DeepSeek, in its privacy policy, mentioned that it stores the information in secure servers located in China.

"Making modern tech accessible to everyone, that is the economic thinking of our PM... Ours is the most affordable compute facility, at this point of time," Vaishnaw said.

The initiative will be powered by the India AI Compute Facility, which has secured 18,000 GPUs to drive the development of a Large Language Model (LLM) tailored for India’s needs.

In March 2024, the Union Cabinet approved the IndiaAI mission with an outlay of ₹10,371.92 crore to establish a robust AI ecosystem by fostering public-private partnerships and providing critical infrastructure for AI innovation.

A key component of the mission is the IndiaAI Compute Facility, designed to build a scalable AI computing ecosystem for the country’s rapidly growing AI startups and research community.

Speaking on the cost of this facility, Vaishnaw said it is the most affordable compute facility. "This is coming at significantly less than 1 dollar, with cost being borne by the government. We will be able to provide subsidy for four years. The real value of AI models will come with algorithmic efficiency, secondly, quality of datasets," he said.

Under the IndiaAI mission, an AI marketplace will be established to offer AI as a service, along with pre-trained models for Indian innovators.

The IndiaAI Innovation Centre will spearhead the development of indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models, catering to critical sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, and governance. A dedicated IndiaAI Datasets Platform will provide seamless access to high-quality, non-personal datasets, enabling startups and researchers to drive AI-driven solutions.

Earlier this month, a technical panel of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) met individually with thirteen companies that had submitted their bids to provide AI compute and cloud services for the IndiaAI Mission, reported Hindustan Times.

The thirteen shortlisted companies were reportedly selected from a total of 19 bidders.

"Jio Platforms, CtrlS Datacenters Ltd, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, E2E Networks Limited, NxtGen DataCenter to supply GPUs," Vaishnaw said.