Ola group’s AI subsidiary Krutrim, which is also a unicorn, on Thursday revealed its intent to launch of India’s first AI chips and a plan to expand its data centre capacity to 1 GW by 2028.
At its Sankalp 2024 event, held at the Ola Futurefactory in Krishnagiri, Tamil Nadu, the Bhavish Aggarwal-led company introduced three distinct families of chips—Bodhi for AI, Sarv for General Compute and Ojas for Edge computing. These chips are reportedly designed to cater to the rapidly evolving demands of AI and general computing.
The ‘Bodhi’ chip will specifically be designed for complex AI workloads to address the need for speed and efficiency of AI systems. By 2028, Krutrim plans to launch Bodhi 2, an advanced version that is expected to be among the top-performing AI chips globally.
Krutrim plans to produce its first AI silicon chip by 2026
To realise its chip development goals, Krutrim has entered into strategic partnerships with leading technology firms Arm and Untether AI. These collaborations will support Krutrim’s capabilities in silicon technology.
“Today’s announcement and demonstration begins our partnership with Ola-Krutrim to build upon the world-class performance and energy efficiency in AI inference that Untether AI provides. We are gratified to be working in close collaboration with Ola-Krutrim’s hardware and software engineering teams to develop next generation AI acceleration solutions utilizing the capability of our At-Memory speedAI architecture,” said Chris Walker, CEO, Untether AI.
Cloud Expansion
Krutrim also announced a major expansion of its cloud services. The company launched over 50 new offerings on its Krutrim Cloud platform, which will be tailored to meet the specific needs of Indian developers. These new services include AI Pods, AI Studio, a Language Hub with multimodal translation capabilities and Customer Experience AI.
As per the company, these offerings are designed to support a wide range of applications, particularly in the growing field of generative AI.
The Krutrim Cloud platform, which the company claims, has already garnered a strong user base with over 25,000 developers and 250 billion API calls since its launch earlier this year.
Krutrim is also offering Rs 100 crore worth of free cloud services to developers until the festival of Diwali. Additionally, the company is providing one year of free cloud services to users of the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) platform.
In a bid to support startups, Krutrim also launched the ‘Krutrim for Startups’ initiative, under which Rs 50 lakh will be awarded to the first cohort of participants in partnership with renowned investors like Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India), DeVC and South Park Commons.
Krutrim’s roadmap will also include an expansion of its data centre capacity. The company said it plans to scale up its capacity to 1 GW by 2028. This expansion will provide the necessary infrastructure to support Krutrim’s AI and cloud initiatives.
“Amidst rapidly changing technology paradigms, India has a unique opportunity to become a global superpower in technologies of the future such as AI. India being the source for 20 per cent of the world’s data and home to one of the largest tech talent pools, is fully equipped to lead the AI wave. With Krutrim, we are focused on making India technologically independent and are making rapid progress in developing full-stack AI capabilities, silicon upwards,” said Bhavish Aggarwal, Founder, Krutrim in a statement.