India rightly positioned to build its own sovereign AI, says AMD’s Zacharia

India is rightly positioned to build its own sovereign AI, stated Thomas Zacharia, Sr.VP, Strategic Technology Partnerships and Public Policy at AMD (Advanced Micro Devices), a Santa Clara-based tech firm that designs and develops high-performance computing and graphics processors.

“Sovereign AI is really about, determining, the future trajectory of how a country wants to be run. And to me, I think India is well positioned to do that. India has data as a major asset. And it has the computing infrastructure that comes as the building blocks in place,’’ Mr. Zacharia told The Hindu in response to a query on his views on India’s readiness for sovereign AI. He was speaking on the sidelines of the opening session of Supercomputing India 2025, a five-day conference on quantum computing, high performance computing and AI hosted by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), MeitY here on Tuesday.

On the importance of building public-private partnership to build digital public infrastructure and also supercomputing, he said, “So you want to create an ecosystem where everybody is contributing and therefore you progress at a pace that is faster than what anyone individual or a company.’’

India has done remarkably well in terms of building the digital public infrastructure, Mr. Zacharia commented adding, “India has defied expectations in terms of what’s been accomplished.’’

According to him, the government can basically provide policy for public good, the government can provide demand signals, through both infrastructure programs and also through funding mechanisms and both these are happening in India.

“I think India has the potential to continue to advance and become a major leader in HPC, AI and quantum computing. And. everything that I heard today at, Supercomputing Conference, confirms my belief that India will be a major player in HPC,’’ Mr. Zacharia further said, commenting on India’s continued thrust on building supercomputing capabilities.

When asked to his views on the future of GPUs, Mr. Zacharia, the former head of Oak Ridge National Laboratory was hired by AMD in March last year to accelerate deployments of sovereign AI around the globe, said“ The future of GPU, as I said, I think the insatiable demand for computing will require companies like AMD to meet that demand, deploying brightest people in India, in Bengaluru, in Hyderabad.’’

Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is a specialised chip for rapid parallel calculations, originally used for rendering graphics, games, video, but currently extremely AI, scientific computing, or handling massive datasets or runs machine learning tasks which CPUs can’t handle.