IndiaAI mission: Start-ups being offered outdated GPUs for AI tasks
What's the story
Indian start-ups have raised concerns over the use of outdated graphics processing units (GPUs) in the IndiaAI Mission.
According to the Economic Times, some cloud service providers are offering NVIDIA A100 GPUs, a model that was declared end-of-life (EOL) in February last year.
This has raised concerns about their long-term viability, especially for mission-critical artificial intelligence (AI) applications.
Expert opinion
EOL status does not render a GPU useless
Despite these concerns, some industry experts argue that an EOL status doesn't necessarily make a GPU useless.
Tarun Dua, CEO of E2E Networks, said that while A100 is no longer being sold by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), it is still widely available via cloud providers and remains a powerful choice for AI workloads.
He further noted that AI processing does not always require the latest hardware, and older GPUs can still deliver competitive performance for certain tasks.
Financial logic
Risks and financial concerns surrounding EOL GPUs
However, relying on discontinued hardware comes with risks. If there are performance issues or a GPU goes kaput, there may not be any manufacturer support or replacements.
Beyond technical issues, start-ups are also questioning the financial logic behind the procurement.
Some bidders argue that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) is offering a bigger subsidy for the A100 than better-performing GPUs.
Subsidy distribution
Subsidy allocation for GPUs under scrutiny
The NVIDIA A100 40GB GPU is priced at ₹136 on-demand and ₹89/month for a reservation.
MeitY is subsidizing ₹54/unit for A100, while newer and more powerful GPUs are being subsidized at just ₹28.
Over longer-term reservations, A100 is being subsidized at ₹34/unit, while higher-performing models get only ₹23.6.
Some bidders argue this allocation should be re-evaluated to prioritize cost-effective, high-performance solutions for Indian AI start-ups.