India’s government is investing heavily in indigenous AI development by backing 20 foundation models, approving 237 projects, and expanding AI infrastructure to build a self-reliant technological ecosystem.
India has moved to deepen state support for domestic artificial intelligence, with the government identifying 20 indigenous foundation model proposals under the IndiaAI Mission and approving 237 projects for subsidised compute support, according to a reply in the Lok Sabha reported by ANI. The push is part of a broader effort to build local capability in AI infrastructure, research and model development while reducing reliance on foreign technology.
Jitin Prasada, Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, said the selected proposals include 12 large multimodal models and eight small language models, with the intellectual property to remain with the applicants. Among the projects already launched are Sarvam AI’s 30-billion and 105-billion parameter models, Indus, Gnani.AI’s speech-to-speech system, BharatGen’s multilingual foundation models and Avataar AI’s video generation model, ANI reported.
The government also said 15 compute service providers have been empanelled under the mission and that the 237 approved projects have been allocated 93.18 lakh GPU hours. It has also placed an order for a high-performance AI compute system of about 1.1 EFLOPS at the NIC Data Centre in Shastri Park, Delhi, according to the parliamentary reply. Separate reports by The Economic Times, Business Standard and other Indian publications said the same initiative was designed to build a sovereign AI stack for applications ranging from language to video generation.
Beyond model development, the reply pointed to wider ecosystem-building efforts. ANI reported that 11 national hackathons and innovation challenges have produced 62 AI prototypes and 20 deployed solutions in public sector institutions, while 58 AI Centres of Excellence have been approved across states and Union Territories, with 22 already started in 13 states and Union Territories. The government also linked the AI programme to its semiconductor drive, saying 12 chip manufacturing projects worth a combined Rs 1.64 lakh crore have been approved, with three already in commercial production. It cited the Stanford Global AI Vibrancy Report published in November 2025, which placed India third in AI competitiveness and ecosystem vibrancy and said the country is the second-largest contributor to GitHub AI projects.
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