UAE’s G42 groups up with Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of compute in India

Abu Dhabi-based tech company G42 has partnered with U.S.-based chipmaker Cerebras to deploy 8 exaflops of computing power via a new supercomputer system in India, the companies said on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.

The system will be hosted in India and follow local data residency, security, and compliance rules. The project aims to provide computing resources for AI applications to educational institutions, government entities, and small and medium enterprises.

“Sovereign AI infrastructure is becoming essential for national competitiveness. This project brings that capability to India at a national scale, enabling local researchers, innovators, and enterprises to become AI-native while maintaining full data sovereignty and security,” Manu Jain, CEO of G42 India, said in a statement.

Abu Dhabi’s Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) are also part of the project. Last year, MBZUAI and G42 released Nanda 87B, a Hindi-English large language model built on Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B model, that is purported to understand casual speech in Hindi and English.

“Deploying this system in India marks a significant step forward in the country’s computational capacity and sovereign AI initiatives. It will accelerate training and inference for large-scale models, enabling researchers and developers to build AI tailored to India’s needs,” said Andy Hock, chief strategy officer at Cerebras.

The India AI Impact Summit this week saw several AI infrastructure initiatives being launched by both Indian giants and international firms.

Indian conglomerate Adani pledged $100 billion to build up to 5 gigawatts of data-center capacity in the country by 2035. Reliance also said it would invest $110 billion over the next seven years for gigawatt-scale data centers.

OpenAI has teamed up with Tata Group to secure 100 megawatts of AI compute in the country as part of its Stargate project, and eventually scale it to 1 gigawatts. And India’s technology minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said at the summit that the country plans to attract over $200 billion in infrastructure investment over the next two years by rolling out a mix of tax incentives, state-backed venture capital, and policy support.

So far, U.S. technology giants, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, have already committed about $70 billion to expand AI and cloud infrastructure in the country.