Powering India's AI Revolution with Yotta and Microsoft
Microsoft-Yotta collaboration powers India's AI Mission, merging Shakti Cloud with Azure AI services for enhanced AI capabilities
In the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), Microsoft and Yotta Data Services are teaming up to create a significant impact in India's digital landscape. This collaboration delivers a much-needed boost to the local AI ecosystem, enhancing the country's AI capacities and fostering innovation within various industries.
Shakti Cloud: India's Powerful Sovereign AI Platform
At its heart, Shakti Cloud is Yotta's bid to claim dominance in the sovereign cloud market—a homegrown data center and GPU farm that meets government regulations for local data storage. Think of it as a fortified, high-performance cluster where you can deploy H100 nodes using GPU-as-a-Service or launch colossal PyTorch trainings on Kubernetes, all without leaving Indian borders.
Shakti Cloud’s platform includes optimized network fabrics, on-prem inference appliances, and APIs for handling both real-time and batch workloads. This setup ensures that AI inference calls don't bounce around the globe before they execute locally, providing Indian startups and app developers with a competitive edge.
Azure AI Foundry: A Pre-Built AI Powerhouse
Azure AI Foundry, Microsoft’s contribution to this collaboration, is designed to spare developers the pain of having to reinvent the wheel. It bundles pre-trained language models, small language models, and vision, speech, and anomaly-detection models, alongside safety filters, content-grounding checkers, and built-in compliance tools.
Furthermore, Shakti Cloud users will effortlessly find Azure AI Foundry's endpoints in their local Azure portal, enabling swift one-click deployments to Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) or virtual networks. This streamlined process significantly reduces development time and eliminates the headaches typically associated with handling Dockerfiles and token limits.
Working Toward a Self-Reliant AI Ecosystem
The IndiaAI Mission, an initiative led by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), seeks to catalyze the growth of homegrown AI. This includes driving Indigenous model development and defining secure data-sharing frameworks. With the partnership between Microsoft and Yotta, the Mission gains the support of established cloud vendors to subsidize compute costs, thereby allowing research labs, startups, and universities to focus on innovative architectures instead of purely handling hardware operations.
As of May 2025, the IndiaAI Mission has received more than 500 proposals for developing indigenous AI models. This collaboration aims to help bring these ideas to life by providing developers with powerful, local AI infrastructure and tools.
Lighting the Path to Global AI Dominance
In a world where China is investing in domestic GPU fabs and state-sponsored AI hubs, and the United States boasts national accelerator programs and multi-billion-dollar generative-AI startups, India should not be left out in the cold. To make AI more than just a slogan in India, predictable and local performance is essential. With the Microsoft and Yotta partnership, Indian startups and developers will have the ability to develop, fine-tune, and serve AI solutions at scale, ensuring they are never left behind.
This collaboration will make a tangible difference in the everyday operations of Indian businesses from health-tech startups to automobile manufacturers. In rural settings, real-time AI applications with ultra-low latency compute will improve the reliability of diagnostic apps and mobile networks. For sensitive government and financial applications, data sovereignty goes beyond merely being a constraint to becoming an essential trust factor.
Ultimately, the goal of the IndiaAI Mission is to empower creators and accelerate the development of indigenous AI models in line with India's Platform Public Infrastructure. With Yotta's Shakti Cloud and Microsoft Azure AI Foundry running at ground-level speed, this collaboration has made the road a little smoother for Indian AI creators,eteching the nation a step closer to becoming a global AI hub. Let's hope it makes the difference Indian AI badly needs.
The Writer
Jayesh Shinde is the Executive Editor at our platform. A technology journalist since January 2008, he has worked with Indiatimes.com and PCWorld.in. An enthusiastic father, reluctant traveler, weekend gamer, Lord of the Rings aficionado, and pseudo bon vivant, Jayesh brings a unique perspective to the world of technology journalism.
[1] Microsoft and Yotta Join Forces to Boost AI in India (IndiaTechOnline)[2] India's Quest for AI Sovereignty (AIM Magazine)[3] Skylo and Microsoft Partner for IoT Solutions in India (Digital Information World)[4] Make in India: The IndiaAI Mission and its wider impacts (Analytics India Magazine)[5] India's Sovereign Cloud Journey: The Rise of Yotta (TCIO Magazine)
- Microsoft and Yotta's collaboration in artificial intelligence (AI) aims to strengthen India's digital landscape, enhancing AI capacities across various industries.
- Shakti Cloud, Yotta's sovereign cloud platform, is designed to meet local data storage regulations and offer Indian startups and developers a competitive edge.
- Azure AI Foundry, a pre-built AI powerhouse provided by Microsoft, offers various models and tools to speed up development for Shakti Cloud users.
- The IndiaAI Mission, led by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), seeks to foster indigenous AI growth through secure data-sharing frameworks and subsidized compute costs.
- With the Microsoft and Yotta partnership, developers will have access to powerful local AI infrastructure and tools, potentially making India a global AI hub.
- The collaboration will impact various sectors such as health-tech startups, automobile manufacturers, and rural settings by improving AI application reliability and data sovereignty.
- Jayesh Shinde, the Executive Editor at our platform, discusses the Indian AI landscape, strategy, and potential impact of the Microsoft and Yotta collaboration in his technology journalism contributions.
