| |SEPTEMBER, 20249TECH MINTAccording to reports, Krutrim, the artificial intelligence startup of Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal, plans to launch its first AI chip, Bodhi 1, by 2026 and a superior Bodi 2 two years later."Krutrim's chips will be custom-built to handle complex AI workloads. They will enable the development of faster and more efficient AI systems," says Bhavish.The Bengaluru-based company is working on four chips: Bodhi 1, Bodhi 2, Sarv 1, and Ojas.The company announces a partnership with global semiconductor companies Arm and Untether AI on the development of CPU and AI chips, platforms, and systems."While Bodhi 1 will be introduced in 2026, it will be designed for frontier LLMs, AI inference, and fine-tuning, and will have best-in-class power efficiency. Bodhi 2 will come by 2028 which will be able to support more than 10 trillion parameter models," says Bhavish.Sarv 1, its cloud-native CPU, will be introduced in 2026 while Ojas, an Edge AI chip will power next-generation Ola Electric vehicles, as per reports."The announced vision and roadmap look appealing, and the timing is apt to impress investors talking about AI and indigenous development of silicon," says Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research and a technology industry analyst."We need to understand more about IP and foundry tape-out plans which is the first key step. The next challenging step is building the AI software stack where hyperscalars such as AWS, and Azure who have also designed their chips, are still majorly dependent on Nvidia and AMD for AI workloads and are years ahead. The timeline for chips looks ambitious, and beyond that, Ola needs to make the entire stack competitive to attract developers and be ready for high capital with an aggressive business model to be viable and compete well with the top hyperscalars," Adds Neil. Aransomware attack on India's major banking technology provider, C-Edge Technologies, caused a temporary shut down of almost 300 small local banks affecting their payment systems.The situation saw quick action from the National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), the country's payment system supervisor."The National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI), an authority that oversees payment systems, in a public advisory issued late on Wednesday said that it had 'temporarily isolated C-Edge Technologies from accessing the retail payments system operated by NPCI,'" the advisory stated."Customers of banks serviced by C-Edge will not be able to access payment systems during the period of isolation," the NPCI added.Customers of these banks were unable to withdraw money from ATMs and even use UPI services due to the ransomware attack.Customers of regional rural banks and cooperative banks that rely on C-Edge, a joint venture between SBI and TCS, were primarily affected."Customers of banks serviced by C-Edge will not be able to access payment systems during the period of isolation," the NPCI said.To get the systems back up and running, the authorities are operating like in a war.It is said that there are about 1,500 cooperative and regional banks residing in India's extensive network, mainly servicing customers outside of large cities.However, the smaller establishments are the ones that bore the brunt of the ransomware attack.The NPCI was observed to immediately execute a comprehensive audit to prevent the attack from spreading and causing further damage.Reports from the media, meanwhile, detail the temporary isolation's differing effects on banks. The Hindu said that the action only affected NPCI services, such as AePS (Aadhaar-enabled payment system) and UPI, however CNBC-TV asserted that affected bank customers were also unable to withdraw cash from ATMs.On the other hand, alerts were sent to banks about the chances of cyberattacks by the Indian cybersecurity authorities and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). KRUTRIM TO LAUNCH AI CHIP, BODHI 1 BY 2026 RANSOMWARE ATTACK WRECKS HAVOC TO ALMOST 300 SMALL LOCAL BANKS
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