NVIDIA CEO Meets With India Prime Minister Narendra Modi 

Meeting underscores NVIDIA’s partnership with the global technology powerhouse following its successful Moon landing.
by Brian Caulfield

Underscoring NVIDIA’s growing relationship with the global technology superpower, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang Monday evening.

The meeting at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg — as the prime minister’s official residence in New Delhi is known — comes as Modi prepares to host a gathering of leaders from the G20 group of the world’s largest economies, including U.S. President Joe Biden, later this week.

“Had an excellent meeting with Mr. Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA,” Modi said in a social media post. “We talked at length about the rich potential India offers in the world of AI.”

The event marks the second meeting between Modi and Huang, highlighting NVIDIA’s role in the country’s fast-growing technology industry.

The meeting with Modi comes just a week after India became the first nation to successfully land on the Moon’s south pole, highlighting the expanding technological capabilities of the world’s largest democracy.

Following Huang’s meeting with Modi, Huang met with several dozen researchers from global powerhouses of science and technology, such as the Indian Institute of Science and the various campuses of the Indian Institute of Technology, for an informal dinner.

The attendees represented a dazzling collection of some of the top minds in fields as diverse as large language models, astrophysics, medicine, quantum computing, and natural language processing.

The evening’s discussions ranged across topics from using technology to address language barriers, improve agriculture yields, bridge gaps in healthcare services and transform digital economies, to addressing some of the grand scientific challenges of our time.

NVIDIA has deep ties to India. The company began operations in Bangalore almost two decades ago. The country is now home to four of its engineering development centers — in Gurugram, Hyderabad, Pune and Bengaluru — and there are now more than 3,800 NVIDIANs in India.

In addition, there are more than 320,000 India-based developers in NVIDIA’s developer program. NVIDIA’s CUDA parallel programming platform is downloaded roughly 40,000 times a month in India, and NVIDIA estimates there are 60,000 experienced CUDA developers in the country.

That growth comes as India’s government continues to expand the nation’s information technology infrastructure.

For example, a compute grid is expected to link 20 cities across the country soon, helping researchers and scientists collaborate and share data and computing resources more efficiently.

That effort, in turn, promises to help support India’s ambitious development goals in the years to come.

Modi has set a target of 2030 for India to become the world’s third-largest economy. It’s currently the fifth largest.

And Modi has set a target of 2047, the 100th anniversary of India’s independence, for the South Asian nation to join the ranks of developed economies.

Huang at India reception of HPC and AI leaders
At a reception after the meeting with Modi (from left) Ajay Kumar Sood, principal scientific advisor to the Government of India, Sashikumaar Ganesan, chair of the Department of Computational & Data Sciences, IISc Bangalore, Huang and Vishal Dhupar, NVIDIA Managing Director, South Asia.