Download the RFE proposal document from MeitY here: [pdf]
As India heads for dedicated AI regulations, under the IndiaAI Mission, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is planning for the dedicated AI Computing Power for “ministries, departments, academia, research institutions, startups and industry.”
The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), which works under MeitY, has issued a Request for Empanelment (RFE) inviting AI Service Providers to supply up to 10,000 AI Compute Units (AICU). The RFE defines AI Computing Units as GPUs, TPUs, accelerators and similar hardware used for AI workloads.
This comes after a major recent MeitY tender inviting AI-capable companies that can supply AI/ML professionals for a “Unified AI Team” to design, develop, and deploy AI-driven services across Digital India platforms such as UMANG, DigiLocker, and other government systems. Read more about that tender here.
Who might be the beneficiaries of this AI computing power: According to the RFE, C-DAC has been designated as the implementing agency for the IndiaAI Mission, including the AI computing infrastructure “to meet the requirement of compute resources across various ministries/departments, academia, research institutions, startups and industry.”
“Based on the demand received from Ministries/Departments, academia, research institutions, startups, industry and other eligible users, C-DAC may, as per the requirement, scale up the total AI Compute capacity beyond 10,000 AICU, during the validity of the empanelment.” – says the tender.
A few potential wide usecases listed:
- “large-scale AI model training,
- Fine-tuning,
- Inference (process of running a trained AI model to make predictions on new, unseen data),
- high-performance computing (HPC), and
- other emerging AI workloads.”
Data Sovereignty and Hosting Requirements: According to the RFE, the finalised companies should follow the following rules:
- All infrastructure, data, metadata, logs, backups and disaster recovery should be within India.
- They should follow data localization laws and comply with all Indian rules on where data must be stored and processed.
- Isolation of C-DAC’s data physically and logically from other customers.
- Making sure of no unauthorized access, use, sharing or transfer of C-DAC’s data and other digital assets.
MeitY said that it needs a secure and shared AI computing platform that can handle up to 10,000 AI compute units, which can serve multiple users at a time without cross-sharing of their data, and be able to operate across several cities too. However, the cities are not specified.
These 10,000 AICUs are to be organised in clusters of 4,000, 1,000 or 512 units, or as specified in Stage-2 of the RFE. Each cluster must have at least 512 AI Computing Units at a single data centre in India, and capacity should be spread across multiple locations.
When Ashwini Vaishnaw spoke of 10,000 GPU demand: On October 8, just a day after the release of this RFE, the Union IT and Electronics Minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, referred to the requirement for the computing power at the World Development Report 2026,
“Our demand estimate is for 10,000 GPUs, and the first tender that we are coming out with is for 5,000.”
He had also said that the government will use an empowerment approach instead of traditional tenders for AI procurement. The RFE does not specify how much of the 10,000 AICUs will be procured in the first round.
At the same event, the Minister once again said that the MeitY would release a consultation paper on AI regulations within a month. Read more about it here.
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- Govt. was hiring Director for its IndiaAI Safety Institute
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