Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), led by Ashwini Vaishnaw, has selected Sarvam AI to build India’s first sovereign large language model (LLM) under the IndiaAI Mission. According to the homegrown AI startup, the new foundation model will be capable of reasoning, designed for speech, fluent in Indian languages and will be deployed on a large scale.
Saravam AI will receive 4086 H100 GPUs for 6 months to build an indigenous model from scratch, the Bengaluru-based startup told Mint.
“We are confident that Sarvam’s models will be competitive with global models,” IT minister Vaishnaw said on Saturday.
“As part of the Sovereign LLM proposal, we are developing three model variants: Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks. We are collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models. Driving this effort is a best-in-class team at Sarvam that understands the depth and complexity of AI development like few others.” Dr. Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam said in a release.
While the boom in AI began with the public launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, the eye-opening moment for India came earlier this year when China’s DeepSeek AI launched its AI models for global users, briefly even taking over ChatGPT and other Western chatbots in Google and Apple stores while wiping out billions in wealth of major tech companies.
Soon after DeepSeek’s roaring success, Vaishnaw had vowed to build India’s own LLM this year, adding that the “foundational models made in India will be able to compete with the best of the best in the world,”
