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Cabinet Approves $1.3 Billion Outlay For 'India AI Mission'

The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved the 'India AI mission' with an outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore for a period of five years, to give a further push for Artificial Intelligence in India. The announcement was made by Union Minister Piyush Goyal at a cabinet briefing, where he reiterated the need to have a robust environment for promoting the tech in the country.

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"The IndiaAI mission will establish a comprehensive ecosystem catalyzing AI innovation through strategic programs and partnerships across the public and private sectors. By democratizing computing access, improving data quality, developing indigenous AI capabilities, attracting top AI talent, enabling industry collaboration, providing startup risk capital, ensuring socially impactful AI projects and bolstering ethical AI, it will drive responsible, inclusive growth of India's AI ecosystem," the government said in a release.

All set to be implemented by the ‘IndiaAI’ Independent Business Division (IBD) under Digital India Corporation (DIC), this mission is set to have eight components including IndiaAI Compute Capacity, IndiaAI Innovation Centre, a dataset platform among others. The government also plans to generate highly skilled employment opportunities with this mission.

As part of building a mega computing facility, the government aims to add AI compute infrastructure of 10,000 or more Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), built through public-private partnership. "Further, an AI marketplace will be designed to offer AI as a service and pre-trained models to AI innovators. It will act as a one-stop solution for resources critical for AI innovation," the government said.

Moreover, the innovation centres will undertake the development and deployment of indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models in critical sectors.

As for education in AI, the government plans to roll out IndiaAI FutureSkills, which is conceptualized to mitigate barriers to entry into AI programs and will increase AI courses in undergraduate, masters-level, and Ph.D. programs. Under the mission, the government will also set up Data and AI Labs in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities across India.


Seems the cost for buying compute time on the cloud is going to get a lot cheaper for Indian AI startups.
 

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India, Europe's EFTA bloc sign $100 billion Free Trade deal

India has pledged to drop tariffs on industrial products from countries including Norway and Switzerland for $100 billion in investment over 15 years. India's economy is likely to be a major focus in upcoming elections.

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India and the four members states of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) on Sunday signed an economic pact worth over $100 billion (€91.4 billion). The EFTA's members are Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, none of which are in the European Union. The agreement must be ratified by all five signatories before it can come into effect. Switzerland plans to do so by 2025.

What do we know about the India-EFTA deal?​


Under the deal, India will lift most import tariffs on industrial products from the EFTA in exchange for investment of $100 billion over 15 years, Indian Trade Minister Piyush Goyal said. The agreement was signed after 21 rounds of negotiations over 15 years.

"It is a modern trade agreement, fair, equitable and win-win for all five countries," Goyal said.

Switzerland's government said that New Delhi will lift or partially remove customs duties on 95.3% of industrial imports from Switzerland either immediately or over time. In a separate statement, Oslo said it had achieved near-zero import taxes on most Norwegian goods. "Norwegian companies exporting to India today meet high import taxes of up to 40% on certain goods," Norwegian Industry Minister Jan Christian Vestre said.

"With the new deal, we have secured nil import taxes on nearly every Norwegian good," he said.

Agreement comes as Modi campaigns on economic credentials​


The announcement comes as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi campaigns for re-election in general elections in May. His campaign has emphasized high GDP growth over the last quarter and his government's plans to turn India into a developed country. Modi is aiming to achieve annual exports of $1 trillion by 2030. In recent years, India has signed trade agreements with Australia and the United Arab Emirates.

India is the EFTA bloc's fifth-largest trading partner after the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and China. New Delhi's Trade Ministry estimated two-way trade with the group amounted to $25 billion in 2023.


++++​

Also, it seems the Tory Govt in UK is worried that India may be holding out for a possibly better FTA deal under a Labour govt post UK's general election later this year:


There has been quite a bit of unusual outreach from the Labour shadow cabinet to India recently. Let's see what gives. One thing's for clear: India isn't in a hurry to seal the UK FTA - it's the Brits (especially Tories) that desperately need a trade deal with a major economy outside Europe post Brexit.

@Nilgiri
 

Gessler

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"Frank Huang, chairman of Taiwan's Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC), revealed in an interview with the Economic Times that the Dholera facility will begin operations with 28 nanometer chips, with plans for future advancements to 22 nm."


In a few years, we should be in a position to replace most server-grade hardware with locally-manufactured CPUs, NAND-Flash & DRAM in all strategic/sensitive applications.
 

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