Govt Selects Eight New Players to Build Foundational LLMs Under IndiaAI Mission

New Delhi: The central government has shortlisted eight additional firms to develop a sovereign large language model (LLM) as part of the Rs 10,300-crore IndiaAI Mission, Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnaw announced on 18 September.

The new participants include Tech Mahindra, Fractal Analytics, BharatGen (an IIT-Bombay consortium), Avataar AI, Shodh AI, Zeinteiq Aitech Innovations, Genloop Intelligence and NeuroDX (Intellihealth).

At a pre-event for the AI Impact Summit 2026, scheduled for February, Vaishnaw said the proposed IIT-Bombay model will receive Rs 988.6 crore in government funding and is expected to feature one trillion parameters, an indicator of the vast internal variables used to capture patterns and relationships in language.

He noted that earlier awardees such as SoketAI, Gnani.ai, Gan AI and Sarvam AI are making strong progress and expressed confidence that India will showcase at least one working home-grown LLM before the summit.

To strengthen infrastructure for these initiatives, the government is partnering with cloud and data service providers to ensure access to high-performance graphic processing units (GPUs). More than 500 data labs are also planned under the mission to expand AI talent and research capabilities.

Vaishnaw further said the Ministry of Electronics and IT will publish an AI governance framework by 28 September to define safety boundaries and checks to protect citizens from AI-related risks. He added that the Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Act, banning all forms of online money games, will take effect on 1 October.

Coordination with the Ministry of External Affairs is underway to finalise the list of international invitees for the upcoming AI Impact Summit.

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