According to a recent report by IDC, unveiled at Intel’s AI for India Conference in Delhi, India’s spending on AI may reach $5.1 billion by 2027. This surge is attributed largely to AI infrastructure provisioning. This includes spending on hardware such as servers and chips, as well as software components like frameworks and libraries.
Santhosh Viswanathan, vice president and managing director, India region, Intel, said, “With an unmatched talent pool, frugal innovation, and data at scale, India stands poised to lead the global AI revolution.” He added that when it comes to building AI capabilities within India, the country does not necessarily need to rely on big GPUs.
Viswanathan said that when it comes to most of the solutions being built in India, Intel’s Xeon processors are enough to deliver the AI needs. “If you are an enterprise running a model with say 15 to 30 billion parameters, Xeon is enough to run these models effectively,” he said.
Viswanathan also highlighted that if companies are building models for RAG on personal data inference, Xeon becomes a powerhouse. “If you have small datasets that are very local and do not have many parameters, Xeon is available everywhere for you to test and try out,” he added, saying that customers can already test out the current models available in the market on the existing Xeon-powered data centres across the country.
Xeon is omnipresent
“Not everybody is trying to build the next largest LLM and needs a trillion parameters,” said Viswanathan. Another use case that he highlights is on-edge, for which Intel’s CPU and NPU are very well positioned for privacy and the cost is significantly lower too.
“AI is not everywhere yet, it’s in one place and you need a lot of GPUs and massive data centres [for building AI]. But over time this is going to change and the costs will come down,” he added.
“You do not need to go back and build massive infrastructures. AI can start today with the infrastructure that you have,” he said. Viswanathan explained that Intel’s go-to-market strategy is about making customers in India realise that they can existing infrastructure that is already using Xeon processors.
Viswanathan said that the reason Intel is going bullish on India is the country’s ability to solve big problems with frugality, like in the case of UPI. He narrated how Intel was the company to bring WiFi in India and just like the internet, Viswanathan said, Intel wants to bring AI everywhere in India.
“Intel’s goal is to democratise access, and the architecture is open,” said Viswanathan. He added that today, people are waiting for compute and this is where Intel comes in with its Xeon processors. Apart from running high-end AI models, Xeon is also effective and scalable for other workloads, and does not cost as much.
“That is why I am bullish on Xeon as it is already available across all databases. It is omnipresent,” he added.
Intel also offers its Developer Cloud where customers can test out its offerings while running them in a secure environment.
For Intel, AI stands for ‘Amazing India’
“When you really need to build something big and test the performance, Gaudi is always there,” Viswanathan said, and added that the company is working with several partners in India to test and benchmark its AI hardware. All of this is along with making AI PCs in partnership with OEM ecosystems such as HPE, Dell, and Lenovo.
Furthermore, the recently announced Gaudi 3 at Intel Vision accelerator is expected to outperform the NVIDIA H100 by 50% in inference throughput on an average and achieve a 40% increase in inference power-efficiency across different parameter models.
This, along with the newer Xeon 6 processor, are also optimised heavily for RAG.
Intel is positioning itself in the market as a low-cost alternative to its competitors like NVIDIA and AMD. Viswanathan said that Intel is always an alternative for a company that is struggling with acquiring compute as the cost is too high. He explains that Xeon is a workhorse for a lot of use cases that do not need an accelerator.
Intel indeed has been bullish on India. There were several collaborations announced at the Intel Vision 2024 such as Bharti Airtel, Infosys, and Ola Krutrim. Moreover, Zoho is also leveraging Intel’s processors for its generative AI offerings.
Infosys’ partnership with Intel is about integrating 4th and 5th Gen Intel Xeon processors, Intel Gaudi 2 AI accelerators, and Intel Core Ultra into Infosys Topaz. This collaboration aims to offer AI-first services, solutions, and platforms to accelerate business value through generative AI technologies.
Ola Krutrim recently launched its open-source model on Databricks platforms. The company utilised Intel Gaudi 2 clusters to pre-train and fine-tune its foundational models with generative capabilities in ten languages, achieving industry-leading price/performance ratios compared to existing market solutions.
Additionally, Krutrim is currently pre-training a larger foundational model on an Intel Gaudi 2 cluster, further advancing its AI capabilities.
Intel also has Make in India partners and is in talks with the government to build systems locally and fully designed in India. “Anybody who is keen on reducing the carbon footprint while also reducing the cost on their wallet, we are absolutely there,” added Viswanathan.
