The Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IITH) and the graphic giant, NVIDIA, have announced a collaboration to establish the country’s first-ever ‘NVIDIA AI Technology Centre’ (NVAITC). The purpose of NVAITC is to facilitate and expedite research of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the adoption of various AI techs in commercial spaces.  

The two entities held an event on Thursday to inaugurate the operations of the centre. IITH has always harboured state-of-art technology to support research amongst the faculty and students. The institute already has NVIDIA DGX-1 TM systems and an NVIDIA DGX-2 TM system, considered to the world’s fastest workstations for leading-edge AI development. 

“As an IIT with a strong fundamental and technological research focus, IITH is very happy to join this program. This combination of NVIDIA’s leading-edge technology for AI Compute and some of the finest minds in the country from IIT Hyderabad will bring synergy to help find solutions to uniquely Indian challenges, be it enhancing crop yield or safer cities. This will build on the strong AI capabilities IIT Hyderabad has built, including the country’s first BTech in AI program,” said BS Murty, Director, IITH.

The NVAITC will help better facilitation of technology for the 220 faculty of the IITH, to accelerate research in areas of Agriculture, Smart Cities and Language Understanding. Projects such as increasing crop yield using AI algorithm, supporting safer transportation systems by applying AI-solutions are the initial projects under consideration. 

“NVIDIA is powering the AI revolution across research facilities everywhere. Our collaboration with IIT Hyderabad will accelerate AI research and help create innovative solutions to real-world challenges,” said Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director for NVIDIA South Asia. 

At the beginning of 2020, the State Government had declared 2020 as the ‘Year of AI’. The vision of this goal is to establish Hyderabad as one of the top 25 global AI innovation hubs.