UAE’s G42 teams up with Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of compute in India

In a groundbreaking collaboration, Abu Dhabi-based technology firm G42 has joined forces with U.S. chip manufacturer Cerebras to introduce a staggering 8 exaflops of computing power through a new supercomputer initiative in India. This announcement was made during the India AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi, emphasizing the significance of local data residency, security, and compliance in the project. The deployment aims to supply essential computing resources for artificial intelligence applications across educational institutions, government bodies, and small to medium-sized enterprises. Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India, highlighted the importance of sovereign AI infrastructure for national competitiveness, stating, "This project brings that capability to India at a national scale, enabling local researchers, innovators, and enterprises to become AI-native while maintaining full data sovereignty and security." In addition to G42 and Cerebras, key players such as Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) are also involved in this ambitious endeavor. Last year, the partnership between MBZUAI and G42 produced Nanda 87B, a large language model that can understand conversational speech in both Hindi and English, based on Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B model. Andy Hock, Cerebras' chief strategy officer, remarked, "Deploying this system in India marks a significant step forward in the country’s computational capacity and sovereign AI initiatives. It will accelerate training and inference for large-scale models, enabling researchers and developers to build AI tailored to India’s needs." The India AI Impact Summit showcased a variety of AI infrastructure initiatives from both local and international entities. Notably, Indian conglomerate Adani committed $100 billion to establish up to 5 gigawatts of data-center capacity by 2035. Similarly, Reliance announced plans to invest $110 billion over the next seven years for gigawatt-scale data centers. Further, OpenAI has partnered with Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts of AI computing capacity in the country, with ambitions to scale it to 1 gigawatt. India’s technology minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, indicated at the summit that the nation aims to attract over $200 billion in infrastructure investments within the next two years through a combination of tax incentives, state-backed venture capital, and supportive policies. To date, major U.S. tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have already pledged about $70 billion to enhance AI and cloud infrastructures in India.