Hyderabad: The Telangana govt unveiled a dual strategy to cement its position as a global epicentre for Artificial Intelligence (AI), including a comprehensive AI Roadmap (2024-25), and launched the ambitious Telangana AI Innovation Hub while outlining a clear vision to lead India in the global AI race.Elaborating on the strategy during a panel discussion on `Tech Telangana 2047: Semiconductors, Frontier Technologies’, IT & industries minister D Sridhar Babu said the AI roadmap will build on Telangana’s 30-year IT legacy and roll out future-focused initiatives under a unified strategy.He said the key pillars of the AI roadmap include semiconductor leadership, leveraging Hyderabad’s ‘Fab City’ and its global ranking in chip design, high-performance compute infrastructure with a facility offering 400 investigatory cores and 500 high-performance GPUs for startups, academia, and industry, The roadmap also includes funding and regulatory collaboration through the `First Funds’ initiative that is targeting 1,000 collaborative projects in partnership with organisations such as Sebi, and convergence and talent to foster a self-sustaining ecosystem to develop local talent.Launching the Telangana AI Innovation Hub, he said this is to address the reality gap in AI, where models may underperform in complex real-world environments. He said the hub is structured around four pillars — Global AI Academy, startup acceleration, private capital mobilization and research and co-innovation labs.While the AI academy is eyeing training around five million students, professionals and govt personnel, the startup acceleration will support 250 startups in three years with an eye on fostering five to seven unicorns.A target of $100 million has been set for private capital mobilization while research and co-innovation labs will focus on applied AI sectors like healthcare, agriculture, manufacturing, mobility and public services, he said.
