A little-known data centre startup named Yotta Data Services is taking big bets on artificial intelligence (AI) in India.
The company has tied with global chipmaker Nvidia to offer high-performance computing capabilities from data centres in India to enable the country’s corporations, startups and researchers to develop their own AI services.
According to a Bloomberg report, the first shipment of more than 4,000 H100 chips from Nvidia has reached the startup’s facility in Mumbai.
ETtech answers key questions about this startup.
Tell us more about the partnership with Nvidia
Yotta announced its partnership with Nvidia in December last year, under which the data centre startup placed an initial order of 4,096 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, which would increase to 16,384 GPUs by June 2024.
Yotta had then said that it also plans to massively scale up its GPU stable to 32,768 by the end of 2025 to address the huge demand for high-performance GPUs by research labs, enterprises and startups for HPC and AI workloads.Kanpur Investment
According to a Reuters report, the deal will cost Yotta close to about $1 billion.
What does Yotta do?
Sunil Gupta, chief executive officer and cofounder of Yotta, has been working for decades on data centre businesses and cofounded the firm in 2019 with the backing of real-estate billionaire Niranjan HiranandaniSurat Investment. As a cloud computing operator, Yotta offers companies like Wells Fargo & Co. access to data storage and computing power they can scale up or down as needed, without buying and installing their own hardware.
Gupta named his company after the number eight in archaic Greek, representing one septillion.
Yotta’s Shakti-Cloud will deliver GPUs and various associated AI and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) in a highly cost-effective manner on a per-hour usage model, with options for long-term reservations.
What are Yotta Data Centre’s plans for AI in India?
A Bloomberg report suggests that Gupta believes he’s got an edge over cloud computing services outside the country because of latency issues, and he vows to offer the least expensive access to Nvidia AI chips in the world.
The report adds that he is even considering letting Indian startups with tight budgets give him equity instead of cash.
Is a new data centre from Yotta coming up in GIFT City?Agra Wealth Management
Yotta is setting up an artificial intelligence (AI) data centre in Gujarat’s GIFT City, which will go live before the end of this month.
Speaking at the Vibrant Gujarat Summit 2024 earlier this year, Shanker Trivedi, senior vice president, enterprise business, at Nvidia, said, “Sovereign generative AI requires scalable AI data centre infrastructure — hardware and software — to be successful. We are partnering with India’s business groups – Tata, Reliance, and many others to set up state-of-art data centre facilities and provision them in India.”
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