It’s a sultry March evening in the suburbs of Mumbai and a group of men hovers anxiously at the back gate of a startup called Yotta Data Services. They pace, pause and fret. It’s approaching midnight, 10 hours late, when a truck pulls up with the precious cargo they’ve been waiting for: semiconductors from Nvidia Corp.
The company’s products are so coveted because they’re essential for the development of artificial intelligence, the technology that’s set off a frenzy in industries around the world. While companies like OpenAI and Google have poured billions of dollars into such chips in the U.S., Yotta is making India’s largest bet yet on the promise of AI.
Sunil Gupta, chief executive officer and co-founder, has gotten a jump on the country’s better-known technology players and conglomerates in part because of the relationship he’s forged with Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s celebrity CEO. “I’m ambitious, I’m hungry,” said Gupta, 52. “I’m willing to take a bet on the future of AI.”
Yotta’s strategy is to offer high-performance computing capabilities from data centers in India so the country’s corporations, startups and researchers will be able to develop their own AI services. Nvidia’s chips, the most advanced on the market, are essential for training large language models and building applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Corp.’s coding assistant, GitHub Copilot. Gupta figures he’s got an edge over cloud computing services outside the country because of latency issues, and he vows to offer the least expensive access to Nvidia AI chips in the world. He’s even considering letting Indian startups with tight budgets give him equity instead of cash.
Demand is on his side. The global AI market is projected to grow from $168.5 billion in 2022 to over $2 trillion by 2032, according to a report by Spherical Insights &Consulting.
“This is a gold rush,” said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “It’s still the early days of AI, and companies just can’t buy enough of this stuff.”
Yotta’s haul of Nvidia chips, which will reach about 20,000 by June, isn’t huge by global standards. Tech giants like Microsoft Corp. purchase them by the tens of thousands, and Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg said he aims to get 350,000 H100s by year-end. Still, Nvidia’s supply is far short of demand so CEO Huang has to calibrate allocations as corporate titans and heads of state press for allotments.
Tata Group and Reliance Industries Ltd., two of the country’s largest conglomerates, plan to develop AI infrastructure too, but have yet to order Nvidia’s most advanced chips. An Nvidia spokeswoman declined to comment on the specifics of Yotta’s order, pointing out that more will be revealed this week. Gupta is speaking at Nvidia GPU Technology Conference.