Nvidia: “N(vidya) means knowledge in India”: Mukesh Ambani tells Jensen Huang

“My version of Nvidia is vidya, which means knowledge in India. Vidya means Saraswati, our Goddess of knowledge. The Goddess of Lakshmi follows,” said Mukesh Ambani, India’s oil-to-telecom baron, to Nvidia founder chief executive Jensen Huang at the Nvidia Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit here on Thursday.

“I knew I named my company right!” Huang responded emphatically.

The Santa Clara, California-based company has seen its market cap zoom past that of Microsoft and Alphabet in a short period of time. At $3.39 trillion, it is now only marginally behind $3.57 trillion of Apple, the world’s most valuable company.

India will multiply its computing hardware infrastructure by 20 times by the end of this year, said Huang, who is also the president of NVIDIA. “India is very dear to the world’s computer industry and central to the IT industry…Our job is to help India build and deploy AI, and your job is to take these libraries and your incredible IT capability,” explained the leader of the world’s second most valuable company.

Huang said that from being the world’s IT back-office India will be producing next-generation AI software and shipping it to the world. He called it ‘software 2.0’. “India used to be a country which produced software. You exported software. In the future, India will export AI,” he said. He also said that India is the hardest region in the world to build AI large language models (LLMs) because of its large linguistic diversity.

“Once you have cracked LLMs in India, you can build in any part of the world,” said Huang. “Building Hindi large language models in India, with our partners. The Hindi dialect changes every 50 kilometres. These are the hardest LLMs to build,” he said. Huang also explained that Moore’s law, which states that the speed of computing grows twice every year but also drives down the cost of hardware by a factor of two, is failing in the case of AI.

“The free ride of Moore’s law has now ended, we have to do something else. Moore’s law says computing grows two times a year. We are now moving technology four times every year. We will experience computing inflation,” Huang said.”We have the necessary connectivity infrastructure. Today, India has the best digital connectivity infrastructure after the US and China. Jio took India from 158 to number one in the world in eight years,” said Ambani.

He said that while in the US, one gigabyte (GB) of data costs $5, and that the world average is $3.5, Jio charges a mere 15 cents per GB. “We have to work together to bring the intelligence age safely to the world to allow the Global South to catch up,” he said, adding that Reliance and Nvidia are partnering to build AI infrastructure in India.