3 min readNew DelhiFeb 7, 2026 10:09 PM IST
India’s installed graphics processing unit (GPU) capacity could triple by the end of 2026 from 38,000 to touch 1,00,000 such devices, with the government also looking to build a sovereign compute capacity of its own, a top government official told The Indian Express.
“The fresh tenders have just been opened and the number of GPUs installed will go up significantly from the current 38,000… by the end of the year, we should have roughly a 100,000 GPUs,” Abhishek Singh, additional secretary, Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY), and CEO of IndiaAI Mission, told The Indian Express during an interaction.
Computing is one of the most crucial layers of modern day AI applications. It enables training massive neural networks on enormous datasets, running complex algorithms, and processing real-time predictions — transforming theoretical models into practical applications that are looking to reshape industries worldwide.
Under the Rs 10,370 crore IndiaAI Mission, the government is subsidising the usage of GPUs of Indian startups and researchers who are building AI solutions, given that computing costs without such subsidy (roughly around Rs 65 an hour) could be prohibitively expensive for smaller companies. To be sure, the government is not funding the procurement of such GPUs, but is only offering a discount to companies that are using the infrastructure that private players have built in India.
The government will itself also become a user of some GPUs for its own activities and that could also add to the installed capacity of such devices, however, in that case, the government will own the underlying hardware. “We are trying to augment a sovereign capacity (for GPUs). There is a lot of need for using GPUs for government work, wherein the AI loads will have to remain in a government-owned infrastructure. We are augmenting the GPU capability of National Informatics Centre’s (NIC’s) Meghraj, we have recently floated a tender for that,” he said.
Singh, who is also spearheading the upcoming India-AI Impact Summit, said that through the event, India would look to address “every dimension of AI”.
“Almost every topic that one can think of across the AI stack including regulation, child safety, etc. everything will be covered. Compared to the previous three summits, this is much more comprehensive, bigger in scale, and will also put up the agenda of the Global South at the forefront,” he added.
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Explaining the government’s focus on developing AI-led solutions to on-ground problems, Singh said, “Our pitch is: build AI in India, for India, and once these solutions have scaled up, we will give an example to the whole world of how AI can be used for solving societal problems”.
On the recent Budget announcement of a tax holiday to foreign companies setting up data centres in India, Singh said that the main rationale was to position India as the data centre capital of the world. “We are trying to position India as the inferencing capital for the world. We are trying to move AI workloads to India that will ultimately give a strategic advantage of becoming the AI capital of the world,” he said.
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