According to reports, the IT ministry has sent letters of intent (LoIs) to bidders for the common compute facility under the IndiaAI Mission and invited them to match the lowest prices (L1) by February 12 in categories where their offers are not the cheapest.

Companies will observe the market adoption of graphics processing unit (GPU) models due to the highly competitive bids, and then adjust their investment and inventory accordingly.

Yotta Data Services chief executive Sunil Gupta says, “IndiaAI allows for putting up bids every quarter so based on market feedback, we can bid for more models in coming quarters.”

Yotta offered 9,216 GPUs, the most among the bidders, but has not emerged as an L1 bidder for any 30 GPU models.

“The fundamental point is I’m sitting on the ready capacity of more than 10,000 GPUs, a big part of which can be made available for IndiaAI requirements, practically immediately,” adds Sunil.

“So, as soon as E2E exhausts their 700 committed H100 GPUs, Yotta gets to offer the next 8,192 H100 GPUs,” says Sunil.

According to reports, the company is seeking some clarifications and will then do the price match on some models where it is not the L1 bidder.

We will consider competing with other models in the future. Our Inferentia and Trianium GPUs are a very compelling proposition, and users will benefit from our adjacencies in AWS,” said founder Uttam Mazumdar.

NxtGen Data Centre & Cloud Technologies, an L1 bidder for five different GPU models, stated in its response to the IT ministry's letter of intent that the government shouldn't be paying exorbitant prices for low-performing GPUs.

“A100/L4 GPUs are not preferred GPUs for training and offer very low performance compared to H200 from Nvidia. There will be no takers for the same,” says CEO AS Rajgopal.