India’s first trillion-parameter model to power next-gen AI apps

**India’s First Trillion-Parameter Model to Power Next-Gen AI Apps**
*By Mudit Dube | Sep 19, 2025, 05:18 PM*

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**BharatGen Consortium Awarded ₹900 Crore to Build India’s Largest AI Model**

A government-backed consortium led by IIT Bombay, BharatGen, has been granted over ₹900 crore under the IndiaAI Mission to develop India’s first trillion-parameter large language model (LLM). This ambitious project aims to create a massive AI system that will serve as the foundation for building smaller, domain-specific models tailored for sectors such as law, agriculture, and finance.

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**From a ‘Mother Model’ to Specialized AI Solutions**

Rishi Bal, Executive Vice President at BharatGen, explained that the trillion-parameter model is not intended for direct use by consumers. Instead, it will act as a “mother system” from which smaller, more efficient AI models can be distilled. These specialized models could include agricultural advisory tools available in regional languages or legal assistants trained on Indian case law, designed to meet the unique needs of various industries.

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**Building a Sovereign Indian Dataset**

To ensure the AI reflects authentic Indian contexts, BharatGen is heavily investing in creating a sovereign dataset by aggregating diverse Indian content. The consortium is collaborating with publishers to license their archives and create comprehensive digital corpora. Additionally, they are providing free OCR (Optical Character Recognition) services to digitize regional texts and are employing crowdsourced annotation to capture the nuances of Indian languages and culture.

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**Hardware Challenges and GPU Availability**

Training a trillion-parameter model requires thousands of GPUs running in parallel. Bal acknowledged the challenges in securing sufficient hardware and noted that BharatGen must wait for GPU supply like others in the field. The ₹900 crore government funding will act as a subsidy to help procure the necessary GPUs. Under the IndiaAI mission, around 40,000 GPUs have been allocated to various projects, including building India’s sovereign LLM models.

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**Focus on Reliability and Real-World Applications**

Ganesh Ramakrishnan, CEO of BharatGen, emphasized that their priority is creating AI models grounded in Indian data and languages with a strong focus on reliability for real-world applications—not just raw scale. BharatGen plans to release distilled versions of the model to developers, enabling startups and enterprises to build AI-powered applications without the need to train colossal systems from scratch.

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**Operational Structure and Future Plans**

BharatGen operates on a hub-and-spoke model with teams distributed across multiple locations in India. According to Bal, this approach helps bring together engineers, data scientists, and domain experts efficiently while keeping operations lean. Ramakrishnan also noted that BharatGen is exploring public-private partnerships and revenue models such as licensing smaller distilled models to sustain and expand the initiative.

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This pioneering project marks a significant step toward India’s technological sovereignty in AI, promising customized and reliable solutions tailored for the country’s diverse sectors and languages.
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