Yotta Infrastructure, a homegrown data centre provider, on Saturday outlined an ambitious plan to launch a cloud service, Shakti Cloud, that it claims will compete with global giants like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.
Sunil Gupta, Co-Founder, MD & CEO of Yotta Infrastructure, made this announcement during a conversation with a conversation with Ganesh Mahabala, Director - Strategic Business, South Asia, NVIDIA, at the CNBC-TV18-Moneycontrol Global AI Conclave in Bengaluru on Saturday, December 16.
Gupta described Shakti Cloud as India's largest AI supercomputing cloud, aimed at addressing the growing demand for GPU chips, a key component in AI models. Gupta emphasised the strategic importance of the project, stating, "Shakti, as you know, is power, and GPU gives the power to run AI, so we thought it's appropriate that we Indians, in India, in an Indian data centre controlled by Indians, are creating a cloud for AI."
Gupta said the cloud infrastructure would be operational by February 2024, with an initial deployment of 4,800 GPUs. Yotta Infrastructure has placed an order for a total of 16,800 GPUs with NVIDIA, with plans to expand the infrastructure to 16,000 GPUs by May 2024.
Gupta explained the uniqueness of Shakti Cloud, highlighting its focus on offering a locally controlled alternative to global cloud providers. "We hope to offer a credible alternative to Amazon, Google, and Azure that is completely designed, built, and operated by India," he said.
The collaboration with NVIDIA plays a crucial role in the project, as Yotta Infrastructure aims to bring GPUs to India on a large scale. Gupta revealed that NVIDIA, in response to a commitment made to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a meeting with its CEO Jenson Huang, has pledged to supply GPUs to India. This collaboration is expected to address the scarcity of GPUs globally.
Mahabala, during the conversation, underscored NVIDIA's commitment to being a technology partner for this ambitious project.
In terms of services, Gupta outlined the key offerings of Shakti Cloud, emphasising its potential impact on various segments. "Whether it is a small startup needing a GTX single card or a large enterprise asking for multiples of them on a usage model, from my side, it will be available. You are not getting stuck with a requirement of millions of dollars to be spent," he said.
Shakti Cloud will purportedly provide a self-service orchestration layer, making it easy for users to access GPU capacity, network capacity, storage capacity, and a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) layer. Gupta stressed on the flexibility of the commercial models, allowing users to opt for short-term or long-term usage without significant upfront investments.
Through this move, Gupta said Yotta hopes to be at the forefront of the acceleration of AI adoption across various industries, providing a cost-effective and user-friendly platform for GPU-intensive workloads.
