Microsoft, in collaboration with Mubadala-backed G42, is set to create India’s most powerful supercomputer, boasting a performance capability of eight exaflops, which translates to performing millions of trillion floating-point operations per second. The announcement was made by G42 India CEO Manu Jain on Tuesday.
In addition to the supercomputer project being developed with Microsoft, G42 also revealed a beta version of a Hindi-language large language model (LLM), named NANDA. This AI engine will enable interactions in Hindi, English, and Hinglish—a blend of Hindi and English.
Jain explained that the partnership follows a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed earlier this year during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Abu Dhabi. The MoU outlined three key initiatives: establishing a massive 2-gigawatt data center in India, constructing one of the country’s largest supercomputers with up to 8 exaflops of power in collaboration with Cerebras, and co-developing AI models within India.
While specific timelines for the data center and supercomputer are not yet available, Jain highlighted the launch of NANDA, named after India’s highest peak. The model has been trained on a dataset of approximately 2.13 trillion tokens, featuring a 13-billion-parameter model.
Andrew Jackson, Acting CEO of G42 group company Inception, noted, “NANDA marks a significant step toward AI inclusivity, ensuring the rich nuances of the Hindi language are well-represented in the digital realm. This launch underscores G42’s dedication to advancing AI excellence and inclusivity.”
