In a landmark step towards strengthening India’s AI capabilities, the Government of India has selected Sarvam to build the country’s sovereign Large Language Model (LLM) under the ambitious IndiaAI Mission. The initiative marks the first time India will develop an indigenous foundational AI model from scratch, capable of reasoning, designed for voice, and fluent in Indian languages.
Sarvam will receive dedicated compute resources to build and deploy the model entirely within India, using local infrastructure and Indian talent. The model is expected to be ready for secure, population-scale deployment, with the broader goal of promoting strategic autonomy, accelerating domestic innovation, and securing India’s leadership in artificial intelligence for the long term.
Sarvam, a pioneering Indian AI company, has already demonstrated leadership in creating foundational models proficient in Indian languages. Evolving from a research lab into a full-stack Sovereign AI platform, Sarvam’s technology is designed to empower governments, enterprises, and nonprofits across India. The company’s models reportedly outperform leading frontier models in Indian language benchmarks while maintaining cost-effectiveness and scalability.
“We are confident that Sarvam’s models will be competitive with global models,” said Shri Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology, Railways, and Information & Broadcasting.
Dr. Vivek Raghavan, Co-founder of Sarvam, expressed pride and responsibility at being selected for the project. “We are humbled by the responsibility bestowed upon us to build India’s sovereign model, and we are ready to build AI that reaches every corner of the country. This is a crucial step toward building critical national AI infrastructure. Our goal is to build multi-modal, multi-scale foundation models from scratch. When we do, a universe of applications unfolds. For citizens, this means interacting with AI that feels familiar, not foreign. For enterprises, this means unlocking intelligence without sending their data beyond borders,” he said.
Adding to this, Dr. Pratyush Kumar, Co-founder of Sarvam, said, “We are deeply grateful to the Government of India for its vision and support in advancing AI. Building an AI ecosystem for India has always been core to Sarvam’s mission, where our research, technology, and models empower builders to create solutions for the country. As part of the Sovereign LLM proposal, we are developing three model variants: Sarvam-Large for advanced reasoning and generation, Sarvam-Small for real-time interactive applications, and Sarvam-Edge for compact on-device tasks. We are collaborating with AI4Bharat at IIT Madras, a leader in Indian language AI research, to build these models. Driving this effort is a best-in-class team at Sarvam that understands the depth and complexity of AI development like few others.”
As part of the broader IndiaAI Mission, the government has also initiated steps to establish a centralised compute infrastructure by onboarding GPU-as-a-service providers like Jio, Yotta, CtrlS, Tata Communications, and NxtGen, aiming to offer GPU access at some of the most affordable rates globally.
