en.Wedoany.com Reported - The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) is launching a plan to significantly expand the scope of subsidized AI computing hardware access for government departments under the IndiaAI Mission framework.

According to an internal memorandum dated June 4, Meity has requested all central ministries to forecast their future demand for Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Ministries have subsequently asked their subordinate departments and agencies to submit respective estimates. For instance, the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DoT) and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), under the Department of Telecommunications, have been asked to assess their computing needs; similar requests have been made to Meity's own Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR).

This arrangement, internally referred to as "Compute as a Service" (CaaS), allows central and state government departments to access GPU capabilities with subsidies of up to 40%, while also gaining access to models and datasets on the Mission's "AI Kosh" platform. Officials stated that Meity has not yet set a fixed budget or timeline for this expansion. However, the Ministry of Finance has allocated 10 billion rupees for the fiscal year 2026-27 to support subsidies for government departments and research institutions. This funding is separate from the approximately 25.52 billion rupees allocated across the 2024-25 and 2025-26 fiscal years (of which 21.94 billion rupees have been committed for expenditure, with actual spending of 9.73 billion rupees, primarily for startup grants and GPU subsidies).

This is not the first time government departments have received subsidized computing resources. According to Meity's response to the Lok Sabha on March 25, 2026, as of that date, government entities constituted the largest single category (78 projects) among the 190 projects approved under the Mission, ahead of startups and MSMEs (46), early-stage startups (30), researchers and academia (27), students (5), and early-stage researchers (4). To date, over 38,000 GPUs have been connected to the Mission's public computing infrastructure.

Industry reaction has been generally positive.

Currently, entities accessing GPUs under the Mission only require an authorization letter from a Director, General Manager, or equivalent official—a relatively lenient eligibility requirement given the anticipated scale of expansion.