IIT Bombay's BharatGen becomes India's top-funded AI project
BharatGen, a non-profit AI group based at IIT Bombay, just landed ₹988 crore ($112 million) from the Indian government under the IndiaAI Mission.
This makes it the top-funded AI project in India and tasks it with building large homegrown AI models for Indian languages—an effort aimed at reducing India's reliance on foreign technology.
Funding to develop trillion-parameter models for Indian languages
With this funding, BharatGen will develop massive AI models (up to one trillion parameters) focused on Indian languages and real-world sectors such as agriculture, education, retail, and public utilities.
To power all this work, they're getting access to 13,642 NVIDIA GPUs for a year—an infrastructure boost worth about $100 million.
Government's role and interest from private sector
BharatGen had earlier raised ₹235 crore ($27 million) from another national mission.
Their new models will first support public services but have already caught the eye of big names like HDFC Bank, IBM, and Zoho.
The government keeps a board seat (but no equity), aiming for a balance between public good and sustainable business.