| | FEBRUARY 20259INDIA'S HOMEGROWN GPU, 18,000 AI SERVERS TO ARRIVE IN 3-5 YEARSTelecom operators are anticipated to acquire additional 5G spectrum shortly, as the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has proposed the auction of approximately 3000 MHz airwaves in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band.With a reserve price of Rs 5.98 crore for each MHz, the spectrum has a value of Rs 17,940 crore. The spectrum is more than 14 percent less expensive at reserve price compared to the 26 GHz band, which is also a mmWave band and was auctioned in 2022. In the 2024 auction, the 26 GHz band received no bids because of an insufficient device ecosystem.Experts believe that the spectrum in the ranges of 37-37.5 GHz and 37.5-40 GHz has a significantly better ecosystem, mainly because the US has already launched 5G services in that band.The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) will decide when to hold the upcoming auction.Trai has suggested that besides mobile operators, internet service providers (Category 'A' and Category 'B') and M2M service providers (Category 'A' and Category 'B') under the unified license, should also be allowed to take part in the forthcoming auction.In August 2023, the DoT requested Trai's recommendations regarding pricing and other methods for the auction of various bands, including those auctioned in 2022 and new bands 37-37.5 GHz, 37.5-40 GHz, and 42.5-43.5 GHz.The regulator subsequently instructed DoT to consider its 2022 recommendations for the auction of current spectrum as the process for establishing pricing for the new bands began in April 2024. In June 2024, the DoT auctioned off the available spectrum following the 2022 Trai recommendations and obtained Rs 11,340 crore by selling 141.4 MHz of spectrum distributed across four bands. India might have the option to foster its own high-end computing chipset, known as GPUs, in the following 3-5 years while a local foundational AI platform is anticipated in 10 months Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Tuesday."We are working on multiple, actually three options, where we take a chipset which is at some reasonable level available in open source or available as a licensed thing, and then build upon that to build our own GPU. That's the approach the entire world has followed and that approach will be able to give us India's own GPU in the time frame of three to five years," Vaishnaw said."We already embarked 18,000 GPUs, very high-end GPUs, and out of that, 10,000 are already available. So this 18,000 compute power will be rolled out in a couple of days. The tender process got completed last week, and in another couple of days, 3-4 days, this will be rolled out," Vaishnaw said."The researchers, startups, academicians, colleges, IITs, all of them can have access to this compute power, and they can start foundational models," Vaishnaw said. "Many of our researchers and startups are also studying some of those papers. There are some papers of 2003 and 2005 which basically tell you how to do a lot of good engineering on the process," he added. TRAI PROPOSES 3000 MHZ MMWAVE SPECTRUM AUCTION FOR 5G BOOST
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