Following the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence discussion paper of 2018, NITI Aayog has released a new approach paper to set up India’s first AI-specific cloud computing infrastructure called AIRAWAT in January 2020. 

As India doubles down its efforts to develop and promote AI technologies, the country also faces the enormous challenge of providing the high computing requirements that comes with machine learning and deep learning technologies. Furthermore, the existing High-Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure that exists for meteorological analysis and scientific researches are insufficient when ML and DL requirements are taken into consideration. 

As a result, the approach paper calls for the development of AIRAWAT, an AI specific cloud computing infrastructure for India. A dedicated AI infrastructure like the proposed AIRAWAT, can significantly improve country’s AI research and increase India’s competitiveness internationally. 

Furthermore, AIRAWAT will also provide an indigenous alternative to present AI cloud platform leaders such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. The decreased dependency on the platforms mentioned above will also alleviate concerns of data privacy and will further strengthen the efforts for data localisation.