Chip behemoth Nvidia expanded tie-ups on Thursday with India's big firms, such as Reliance Industries, and launched a lightweight artificial intelligence (AI) model for the widely-used Hindi language, as it looks to tap a growing market.

The company is hosting an AI summit in the business capital of Mumbai, at which Chief Executive Jensen Huang chatted with the chairman of conglomerate Reliance, Mukesh Ambani, who is also Asia's richest man.

"Nvidia is AI in India," Huang said. "In just one year's time, by the end of this year, we will have nearly 20 times more compute here in India than just a little over a year ago," he added, referring to the infrastructure for computing.

From large companies to startups, businesses in India have focused on building AI models based on its diverse languages to grow consumer appeal and drive activities such as customer service AI assistants and content translation.

Nvidia said it was rolling out the new small language model, dubbed Nemotron-4-Mini-Hindi-4B, with 4 billion parameters, for firms to use in developing their own AI models.

"The model was pruned, distilled and trained with a combination of real-world Hindi data, synthetic Hindi data and an equal amount of English data," it said in a statement.

Indian IT services firm Tech Mahindra is the first to use the Nvidia offering to develop a custom AI model called Indus 2.0, focused on Hindi and dozens of its dialects, the U.S. company said.

Just a tenth of the population of 1.4 billion speaks English in India, where the constitution recognises 22 languages, it added.

Besides Tech Mahindra, Nvidia is partnering with India's other IT giants Infosys, TCS and Wipro , to train about half a million developers to design and deploy AI agents using its software.

Reliance and Ola Electric were among the companies that would use its "Omniverse" simulation technology, allowing them to test factory plans in a virtual world.

Crowd at event

Thursday's event was delayed more than half-an-hour, which managers blamed on the large crowd that gathered to see Huang, the face of the AI chip boom, a number an Nvidia employee described as "easily a few thousand".

Unlike large-language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4, used to power ChatGPT, small language models are trained on much smaller and more specific datasets. Typically cheaper as well, they are more attractive for companies with scarce resources.

Global chip firms are investing and setting up facilities in India as it races to build up the semiconductor industry and compete with major hubs such as Taiwan, though analysts say the effort could take years.

Since first setting up shop nearly two decades ago, Nvidia has engineering and design centers in India, as well as offices in key cities such as the southern tech hub of Bengaluru and neighbouring Hyderabad.

In September last year, Reliance and Nvidia vowed to develop AI supercomputers in India and build large language models trained on its languages. Later that year, Nvidia unveiled a similar partnership with Tata Group.