Oracle’s four India partners may fail to make AI mission cut

The race for the government’s Rs. 10,000 crore ‘India AI mission’ to acquire advanced AI chips could throw some surprises. None of the four service partners of Cloud major Oracle – Ishan Infotech, Path Infotech, Cyfuture India and Unicloud Labs – could make it to the technical evaluation round this week.This may hinder the American cloud company’s ability to empanel with the much-coveted Mission to offer AI compute capacity in India through public-private partnership and bid for future projects.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is standing strong with seven service partners who made presentations before the Mission’s board hearing on technical requirements on Tuesday at the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) in New Delhi. These were CloudThat Technologies, CMS Computers, Hostin Services, i2k2 Networks, Locuz Enterprise Solutions, Orient Technologies and Vensysco Technologies.

The third hyperscaler Microsoft Azure has stuck to its only partner Yotta Data Services to provide AI compute under the Mission. Google Cloud did not participate in the Mission.

Bhavesh Goswami, founder and chief executive, CloudThat, in response to ET’s queries in a statement said, “CloudThat is an advanced tier Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner. These GPUs, managed through AWS, are expected to consist of 70% Nvidia H100 GPUs, with the remainder being custom versions tailored to the project’s specific needs.”

Out of 13 bidders, only top 6-7 players would likely make it to the financial round, sources said.

This comes at a time when Oracle is investing top dollars in various geographies betting on the AI opportunity and its stock breaching all-time highs.“Surprisingly, Oracle’s partners did not make it to the technical evaluation round despite the company’s provision of high-power GPUs (graphics processing units) clusters within India,” a rival company’s senior executive close to the development told ET.

“From the technical stage, it was clear that a government has laid immense attention to support ‘Make-in-India’ goals, not just from the perspective of installing GPUs, but also how data is processed and stored,” said another company executive who was part of the evaluations. “This is because the government’s expenditure must be carefully spent in promoting local champions while also maintaining healthy competition from global giants.”

Oracle, Azure and AWS did not respond to ET’s query till press time.

The government initiative aims to make available 10,000 GPUs to support startups, researchers, students and academicians. Around 44%, or Rs 4,563.63 crore, of the Rs 10,371.92 crore ($1.25 billion) approved by the cabinet for the ‘IndiaAI Mission’ in March last year is reserved for providing compute capacity of more than 10,000 GPUs over five years.

The 13 bidders for the GPU tender were picked from a list of 19 applicants. Among them are Jio Platforms, Tata Communications, Yotta Data Services, E2E Networks (in partnership with L&T), Ctrl S Datacenters, and NxtGen Datacenter and Cloud Technologies.