Google Cloud powers IIT Madras' Indic Arena, expands local AI capacity for India

New Delhi, Nov 11 (IANS) Google Cloud and Google DeepMind on Tuesday announced a collaboration with IIT Madras in launching Indic Arena, a public platform that will let Indian users anonymously evaluate and rank AI models on tasks unique to the country’s multilingual landscape.

Google Cloud is providing cloud credits to power the community‑driven resource run by the AI4Bharat centre at IIT Madras, according to a statement.

It also announced an expansion of local AI hardware capacity for customers in India, "powered by Google's AI Hypercomputer architecture with the latest Trillium TPUs".

The move will help more businesses and public sector organisations train and serve their most advanced Gemini models in India, the release said.

Further, the US tech giant said that the move will address data residency and sovereignty requirements.

Google welcomed startups, universities, government bodies and enterprises to use this new, dedicated capacity for Gemini in Vertex AI.

Indic LLM‑Arena is a crowd-sourced, human-in-the-loop leaderboard designed to benchmark LLMs on the three pillars that affect the Indian experience: language, context, and safety.

"At AI4Bharat, our mission is to build AI for India's specific needs. A critical part of this is having a neutral, standardised benchmark to understand how models are performing across our many languages,” said Mitesh Khapra, associate professor, IIT Madras.

“A model's ability to discuss a topic in perfect English is irrelevant if it fails to understand a farmer in rural Maharashtra, provides a culturally inappropriate response to a user in Sikkim, or cannot parse a Tang-lish query from a student in Tamil Nadu,” a separate statement from IIT Madras explained.

Earlier this year, Google Cloud made Gemini available to regulated Indian customers by deploying Gemini 2.5 Flash with local machine-learning processing support.

IANS

aar/na