By Aditya Kalra
GANDHINAGAR, India (Reuters) – Indian data center operator Utah’s plan to buy more AI chips from its partner Nvidia will be worth $500 million, bringing its total order book with the U.S. firm to $1 billion as Utah’s AI Cloud services have expanded. The executive told Reuters.
Utah said last month it would order Nvidia chips but did not specify a price for the deal or say which chips it would buy.
The order will cover about 16,000 of Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips H100 and GH200 and will be held until March 2025, Utah CEO and co-founder Sunil Gupta told Reuters on Thursday.
This comes on top of Utah’s order with Nvidia last year for about 16,000 H100 chips, which are due for delivery by July of this year, Gupta said.
The AI deals in India are crucial for Nvidia, which faces restrictions on some chip exports to China and some other countries due to US sanctions.
Last September, the American chipmaker entered into an AI partnership with Indian companies Reliance Industries and Tata Group to develop cloud infrastructure and language models as well as generative AI applications.
Yotta, part of Indian billionaire Niranjan Hiranandani’s real estate group, is a partner firm for Nvidia in India and operates three data center campuses near Mumbai, Gujarat and New Delhi.
Growing storage and processing demand has prompted the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon to ramp up cloud and data center investments in India in recent years. Indian billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani have also joined the race.
Nvidia has a near-monopoly globally on the computing systems used to power services like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s blockbuster generative AI chatbot. Utah estimates that AI adoption in India will reach $14 billion by 2030.
“India’s AI ambition is not possible unless this infrastructure comes to India,” Gupta told Reuters on the sidelines of the Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit. The event, held in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state, is one of his last major efforts to attract investment before he stands for re-election later this year.
Yotta is setting up an AI data center in Gujarat International Finance Tech City, a new tech city, which will go live by March, Shankar Trivedi, a top Nvidia executive, said at the Gujarat event on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Aditya Kalra in Gandhinagar, Gujarat; Writing by Munsif Vengatal; Editing by Susan Fenton)