Yotta Data Services, a lesser-known data center startup, is making substantial investments in artificial intelligence (AI) within India. Collaborating with global chipmaker Nvidia, the company aims to deliver high-performance computing capabilities from Indian data centers, empowering local corporations, startups, and researchers to develop their own AI services.
The partnership with Nvidia, initiated in December last year, saw Yotta placing an initial order of 4,096 NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs, with plans to increase the count to 16,384 GPUs by June 2024. Moreover, Yotta aims to expand its GPU stable to 32,768 by 2025, addressing the growing demand for high-performance GPUs in research labs, enterprises, and startups for both high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads. This endeavor is estimated to cost Yotta close to $1 billion, as per Reuters.
Founded in 2019 by Sunil Gupta, who has extensive experience in the data center industry, along with support from real-estate billionaire Niranjan Hiranandani, Yotta specializes in providing cloud computing services. It enables companies like Wells Fargo & Co. to access scalable data storage and computing power without the need to invest in their own hardware. Yotta’s offerings, such as the Shakti-Cloud, provide GPUs and various AI and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions on a per-hour usage model, with options for long-term reservations.
Gupta envisions Yotta gaining a competitive advantage over foreign cloud computing services due to reduced latency issues, offering the most affordable access to Nvidia AI chips globally. Additionally, Gupta contemplates accepting equity from Indian startups with financial constraints instead of cash payments.
Yotta is also establishing an AI data center in Gujarat’s GIFT City, slated to commence operations before the end of this month. At the Vibrant Gujarat Summit 2024, Shanker Trivedi, senior vice president of enterprise business at Nvidia, emphasized the importance of scalable AI data center infrastructure for sovereign generative AI. Nvidia is collaborating with prominent Indian business groups, including Tata and Reliance, to establish cutting-edge data center facilities in India.
