C-DAC, the government computing centre under India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, has issued a request for empanelment inviting AI service providers to supply up to 10,000 AI compute units for the IndiaAI Mission. The document, reference C-DAC/GPU/01/2026, is dated 7 October and sets a submission deadline of 29 October, with technical proposals opened the following day.
The structure is the detail worth reading. Capacity is to be offered in clusters of 4,000, 1,000 or 512 units, and every cluster must sit in a single data centre inside India. A compute unit is defined broadly enough to cover GPUs, TPUs and comparable accelerators, so the tender is not written around one vendor. The empanelment runs three years and can be extended by up to three more, with the scope of services running five years. C-DAC says it may scale past 10,000 units during that period.
Why it matters: this is the supply side of a mission more often discussed for how slowly it has released money. The requirement that each cluster sit on one site in India is the sovereignty condition, and at this scale it is also the hardest part to meet.