NEW DELHI, May 17: The government will fund up to 50 per cent of AI compute infrastructure that will be created in partnership with the private sector, a senior official said on Friday.
While speaking at a CII Annual Business Summit, Ministry of Electronics and IT (Meity) Secretary S Krishnan said the government is looking to set up at least 10,000 graphics processing unit (GPU) based compute capacity in the country soon.
“The government is prepared to provide for at least up to about 50 per cent of the cost of creating this infrastructure. In order to speed up the entire process. The idea is to partner with a variety of private institutions so that we are able to work with the private sector in making this capacity available quickly,” Krishnan said.
Also, noting that a lot of fiscal resources will be needed for climate financing, Bery said domestic resource mobilisation will be more for mitigation, while adaptation will require private finance.
“There is a large demand that is going to be made on fiscal resources at a time when tax revenues are themselves going to be affected by decarbonisation as a large part of our revenues, at both the state and the centre level, comes from fossil fuel taxes,” he said.
“So, resource mobilisation is implicitly about mitigation while private finance is needed for adaptation,” Bery added.
Citing the success of the Jan Dhan scheme, Bery said that it should be possible to move away from subsidies to direct payments.
“It will clean up the subsidy side of the government to create fiscal space for some of the new requirements,” he said.
Bery highlighted that climate finance is both about addressing mitigation as well as adaptation needs.
He also suggested that clean technology projects could be bundled together, along with capital from various sources, to bring in greater private sector participation.
Speaking at the event, 15th Finance Commission NK Singh said it is important to recognise what makes private capital reticent and what can be done to minimise and mitigate the risks, including regulatory risks so that they can contribute to climate finance.
Singh noted that multilateral development banks have a long way to go to improve their processes to address the daunting challenge of meeting the financing needs required for an orderly climate transition. (PTI)
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