NPCI, NVIDIA partner to build sovereign AI for UPI
What's the story
The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has announced a strategic partnership with tech giant NVIDIA. The collaboration aims to enhance India's digital payment ecosystem by building a sovereign artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure. The initiative will focus on trust, resilience, security, and ecosystem-wide enablement of large-scale real-time payment systems.
Technological integration
NPCI to use NVIDIA's AI and computing platforms
The NPCI plans to use NVIDIA's AI and accelerated computing platforms in its operations. As part of the partnership, the NPCI will deploy NVIDIA Nemotron, a family of open models with open weights, training data, and recipes. This will help create a payments-native AI foundation model that complies with India's regulatory framework and data sovereignty requirements.
AI expansion
Transitioning from use-case specific AI agents to foundational layer
NPCI's AI deployments have been driven by operational needs from high transaction volumes. The organization recently tested the UPI Help Assistant, powered by FiMI (Financial Model for India), a fine-tuned and pre-trained Small Language Model built for the payments ecosystem. Now, NPCI plans to shift from use-case-specific AI agents to a foundational and scalable AI layer for the payments ecosystem.
Model evolution
Proposed architecture could utilize mixture of experts techniques
The proposed architecture of the AI model could use techniques like Mixture of Experts (MoE) for high-volume, low-latency environments. NPCI plans to expand the model's capabilities across multilingual datasets and agent-optimized systems over time. The initiative is expected to drive innovation in areas like trust frameworks, grievance redressal, and operational intelligence while ensuring data security, sovereignty, and responsible AI use.
Ecosystem support
AI foundation model will be open for banks, fintech companies
The proposed AI foundation model will be open for banks, fintech companies, and other ecosystem participants. Vishal Kanvaty, NPCI's Chief Technology Officer, said the collaboration aims to build a sovereign payments-native AI foundation tailored to India's regulatory and operational requirements. NVIDIA's Managing Director for Asia South, Vishal Dhupar, added that this partnership seeks to bolster India's fintech infrastructure through accelerated computing and AI.