The AI tools most people use were built for English speakers, by teams in San Francisco, running on infrastructure in Virginia. That’s not a criticism — it’s just context. And that context matters enormously when you’re building for India.
India has 1.4 billion people, 22 scheduled languages, and one of the fastest-growing developer ecosystems in the world. It also has specific infrastructure constraints, specific regulatory requirements, and specific cultural contexts that global AI systems weren’t designed for.
This is why Ola Krutrim’s investment in building Indian AI infrastructure matters — and why we built Jivam on top of it.
The data problem
Good AI models require good training data. For English, there’s an abundance of high-quality text on the internet — books, articles, code, academic papers. For Indian languages, that data is much harder to assemble. It requires deliberate effort to collect, clean, and curate.
Sarvam-105B was trained with Indian language data as a first-class concern. Not as an afterthought, not through translation, but through direct training on native Indian language text at scale.
The infrastructure problem
Running frontier AI models at scale requires serious compute infrastructure. Until recently, that infrastructure was almost entirely in the US and Europe. That creates latency, cost, and data sovereignty concerns for Indian users and businesses.
Krutrim Cloud is building that infrastructure in India. This isn’t just about speed (though lower latency matters). It’s about building a foundation for Indian AI that doesn’t depend on infrastructure controlled elsewhere.
What this enables
When the model understands your language and the infrastructure is local, things that were previously impossible become straightforward:
- Real-time AI assistance for users on slower connections
- Compliance with Indian data residency requirements
- AI tools that understand Indian regulatory and business contexts natively
- Pricing that makes sense for Indian developers and businesses
Jivam is built on this foundation. We think it matters — not just for us, but for the broader ecosystem of AI tools being built for India.