IndiaAI Mission: Centre eases tender norms; small firms to benefit

Being a part of the IndiaAI Mission is now within the reach of smaller players and startups, with the government easing conditions for the procurement of 10,000 GPUs. Provisions of artificial intelligence (AI) compute units have been relaxed and the total turnover limit for bidding firms lowered by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), according to a revised tender released by the government.

The average turnover requirement has now been brought down to Rs 50 crore from Rs 100 crore for primary bidders, and reduced to Rs 25 core from Rs 50 crore for non-primary consortium members, a Moneycontrol report confirmed.

The Centre’s decision follows a pre-bid meeting last month when many companies said tender requirements were too restrictive, especially for smaller players. Smaller companies, especially newcomers in the business, often could not meet the high limits that the tenders demanded.

Provisions of artificial intelligence (AI) compute units have been relaxed, too. In the original tender, the Centre had mandated that a company needs to have a minimum of 1,000 AI compute units on its cloud platform to qualify for bidding, and the units must have an AI compute memory of 40 GB. Performance thresholds sought was 15 TFLOPS for FP32 and 300 TFLOPS for FP16.

According to the revised tender, the performance threshold for FP16 has been scaled down to 150 TFLOPS, and AI compute memory for 40 GB must now be 24 GB. The lowering of the mandates will bring down operational costs, and work in favour of small players, who’ll no longer have to spend on more powerful and steeply-priced hardware.

The IndiaAI Mission, worth Rs 10,732 crore, was approved by the Centre in March this year.