India’s first AI chip will be launched by this year
Business Business. AI startup Crutrim, launched in December last year by Ola Cabs co-founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal, on Thursday announced that the firm will design, manufacture and launch its first AI chip by 2026. The first family of chips being developed is called “Bodhi” for AI, “Serve” for general compute and “Ojas” for edge computing. The company also said that Bodhi-II will be launched in 2028. For this, the company announced strategic partnerships with global chip-makers Arm and Unteher AI. At the Ola Sankalp 2024, Aggarwal said: “India has a unique opportunity to become a global superpower in future technologies like AI. India is the source of 20 per cent of the world’s data and has one of the largest tech talent pools, perfectly equipped to lead the AI wave.” The company also announced plans to increase Crutrim’s data centre capacity to 1 gigawatt by 2028. The capacity is currently 20 MW. A few months ago, Aggarwal migrated Ola’s workload from Microsoft Azure to its own Krutrim Cloud. At the event today, Aggarwal said that over 50 new services have been launched on Krutrim AI, making it ready for most applications required by Indian developers.
The company said that Krutrim Cloud will expand its services to cover infrastructure domains, developer platforms, data platforms, AI models, AI platforms and AI applications. Giving details on how Krutrim has been accepted by Indian developers, Aggarwal said that over 25,000 developers have used Krutrim Cloud. Moreover, 250 billion API (application programming interface) calls have been made across all products since its launch in early 2024. And, over 1 trillion tokens have been generated on Krutrim in the last six months, he said. The company also said that cloud services worth Rs 100 crore will be free by Diwali. “Our ambition with this company is to really make consumption accessible to every Indian, and it goes beyond mobility,” Aggarwal said. To start with, Ola Cabs relaunched the Ola Share feature for its ride hailing services. It will be available in Bengaluru from today and will be rolled out to other cities as well. Aggarwal also announced the launch of a loyalty programme called Ola Coins, which will be applicable across multiple Ola services. Talking about the growing trend of instant commerce and the need for faster deliveries, Aggarwal announced the launch of an automated warehouse, saying only automation can give the desired scale, which will be available to brands on ONDC.
