India's Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology unveiled a ₹120 billion compute credit program on Thursday aimed at domestic artificial intelligence startups. Companies incorporated in India with majority local ownership may claim subsidized GPU hours on government-approved cloud regions through March 2028.
Officials said credits cover up to 60 percent of inference and training costs for models that document use of Indian language corpora and store weights on servers physically located within the country. The policy aligns with data localization drafts released earlier this year.
Who Qualifies
Eligible startups must have raised no more than $50 million in external funding and demonstrate open publication of model cards describing training data sources. Multinational subsidiaries may participate only through joint ventures with Indian majority partners.
Infrastructure Backing
Yotta and Tata Communications expanded GPU clusters in Mumbai and Hyderabad to absorb demand. NVIDIA supplied reference architectures; local firms assemble racks under technology transfer agreements.
Industry Reaction
Founders welcomed cost relief but asked for longer grant periods than the initial 18-month windows. Investors said credits may tilt venture dollars toward applied AI rather than capital-intensive robotics.
Geopolitical Context
The announcement follows U.S. export controls on advanced accelerators to certain Chinese entities and parallel EU subsidy schemes. Delhi positions the program as sovereignty insurance for a market of 1.4 billion users.
