Centre may allot Rs 10,000 crore for quantum computing hubs

The government is likely to allot up to Rs 10,000 crore for setting up supercomputing and quantum computing hubs in collaboration with the private industry under public-private partnerships, officials aware of the development told ET.

An announcement to this effect is likely to be made during Global Artificial Intelligence Summit and Awards scheduled to be held here on January 18 and 19, a government official said.

The proposed hubs will offer access to high-performance computing to startups, micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and other companies, either on lease or on a “compute-as-a-service” basis, another senior official said.


“The idea is to add up to 30,000 GPUs (graphic processing units) overall in a somewhat DPI (digital public infrastructure) model,” the official said.

To start with, the quantum computing hubs will be set up in higher education academic institutions and government research and development (R&D) centres of prominence, the official said. “Overall, it may take up to 10 years to develop the total computing strength,” the person added.

ET had in October 2023 reported that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) was considering a proposal to set up a cluster of 25,000 GPUs under public-private partnerships to be made accessible to Indian companies working on artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies that require high computing capacity.

Apart from the announcement on offering of compute capacity as a service, the government may also announce adoption of most of the proposals of seven working groups on AI, a senior MeitY official said.

The seven working groups had submitted their reports in October last year. Their suggestions included setting up a data management office, a national centre for artificial intelligence (AI), skilling on AI, and finding ways to ensure responsible implementation of a national strategy on AI.

“For example, we have the NDMO (national data management office), which has been suggested by one of the working groups,” the ministry official said. “The proposal is for a non-statutory but independent agency. It will suggest and oversee the procedure for collection, storage, quality control and independent audit of all data collected by government-run institutions.”