Empanelment of AI services on cloud 

Government of India has approved the IndiaAI Mission with a Budgetary outlay of Rs 10372 Cr with the objective to bridge the gaps in the existing AI ecosystem and enable emergence of India as a hub of development of AI technology and applications. 

IndiaAI Mission is being implemented through 7 key pillars and one of the key pillars is enabling the availability of 10,000 GPUs for AI Compute Infrastructure. Towards this objective, The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), through IndiaAI Independent Business Division (IBD), published a Request for Empanelment (RFE) on August 16, 2024, to empanel AI services on cloud and offer the services to academia, MSMEs, startups, research community, governments, public sector agencies and other entities approved by IndiaAI via the CPP portal. 

19 bidders that included Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), Managed Service Providers (MSPs), and Data Center Service Providers submitted proposals. After initial scrutiny as per the pre qualification criterion 13 bidders were invited to make presentations to the technical evaluation committee. As per the technical evaluation, ten bidders were found to be eligible for opening of financial bids. The financial bids of the 10 technically qualified bidders were opened on January 22, 2025. The 10 bidders listed below have offered their commercials for various category of AI compute units (GPUs) quoted.

1. CMS Computers India Pvt Ltd
2. Ctrls Datacenters Ltd
3. E2E Networks Limited
4. Jio Platforms Limited
5. Locuz Enterprise Solutions Limited
6. NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies Private Limited
7. Orient Technologies Limited
8. Tata Communications Limited
9. Vensysco Technologies Limited
10. Yotta Data Services Private Limited

These bidders have quoted diversified category of AI compute units (GPUs) that include Intel Gaudi 2, AMD MI300X, MI325 X, NVIDIA H100 (PCIe, NVL and SXM), NVIDIA H200 (PCIe, NVL and SXM), NVIDIA A100, NVIDIA, L40S, NVIDIA L4, AWS Inferentia2 and Aws Tranium. Bidders have also offered 8 GPU modules of NVIDIA and AMD.

As per the terms of empanelment, the bidder quoted the L1 rates for a particular category of compute unit will be empaneled first and all other bidders in that category of the compute unit will be eligible for empanelment if they agree to match the L1 bid. 

The lowest (L1) bidder, L1 bid price offered in each AI compute category and discount in percentage offered On-demand hourly, monthly, 6 monthly and annually in comparison to published market prices is given in Annexure 1 in Tables A & B

The L1 bidder price offered for storage and network services is given in Annexure 2 in Tables C & D.

The bidders have also provided AI Platform and other services at a discounted price in comparison to their market price.

The empanelment will be valid for 36 months, with the option to extend for an additional 12 months based on mutually agreed terms. IndiaAI will ensure that all processes post-empanelment is transparent and accessible to stakeholders.