₹14,257 Crore for Compute: Odisha's Bid to Host India's AI Backbone
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Article summary
Odisha attracted an investment of about ₹14,257 crore by HCLTech and the Indian AI startup Sarvam AI to develop artificial-intelligence data-centre infrastructure in the state. Data centres are the physical backbone of the digital and AI economy — large facilities of servers, storage and networking that host the computing power, or 'compute', on which cloud services and, increasingly, the training and running of AI models depend. As AI models grow, so does the demand for compute, making data-centre capacity a strategic asset and a bottleneck: a country that lacks domestic compute must rent it abroad, with implications for cost, data sovereignty and control. The investment reflects both the race among Indian states to attract data-centre projects and the national push to build sovereign AI compute capacity rather than depend on foreign cloud providers. The partnership pairs an established IT services firm with a home-grown AI developer, signalling an effort to build not only the hardware but the domestic capability to use it.
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Sample questions — answers revealed after test
Q1. The specialised processors most associated with training large artificial-intelligence models are which of the following?
Q2. The article argues that a data-centre investment is 'really about three scarce inputs'. Which one of the following correctly names those inputs?
Q3. Consider the following statements about AI data centres: 1. Their heavy power and water demand makes their environmental footprint a genuine policy concern. 2. Domestic control of compute capacity is relevant to a country's technological sovereignty. 3. Because a data centre chiefly runs software, its establishment imposes no significant demand on the local electricity grid or water supply. Which of the statements given above are correct?