New Delhi: The Centre will establish more than 500 data laboratories across India to strengthen artificial intelligence (AI) talent and infrastructure, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced at a pre-event for the AI Impact Summit 2026.
The initiative forms a key pillar of the Rs 10,300 crore IndiaAI Mission, which aims to build sovereign AI capabilities and reduce dependence on global models.
Vaishnaw said the data labs will provide advanced compute resources and curated datasets to researchers, startups and enterprises. In parallel, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser will release an AI governance framework within 10 days.
He also revealed plans for sector-specific small language models focused on agriculture, weather forecasting, manufacturing, logistics and transportation. To meet growing compute demands, Abhishek Singh, Additional Secretary and the CEO of IndiaAI Mission, MeitY, has been tasked with exploring an expansion of the current stock of 34,000 GPUs by an additional 10,000 units.
The announcement complements other IndiaAI initiatives, including the development of sovereign large language models (LLMs) trained on Indian datasets and languages.
Eight new partners have been selected to build these foundational models, among them Tech Mahindra, Fractal Analytics and BharatGen, an IIT-Bombay consortium. IIT-Bombay’s proposed LLM, projected to reach one trillion parameters, has received financial backing of Rs 988.6 crore. Funding has also been earmarked for AI startups and accelerators to spur innovation across priority sectors.
Officials emphasise that these measures, data labs, LLM development, GPU expansion and sector-specific models are intended to create a domestic AI ecosystem that can serve India’s linguistic diversity and industrial needs while supporting global efforts for a common AI governance framework.
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