Krutrim’s chips will be custom-built for handling complex AI workloads, Aggarwal said. “They will enable development of faster and more efficient AI systems.”
The Bengaluru-based company is working on four chips: Bodhi 1, Bodhi 2, Sarv 1 and Ojas. On Thursday, it announced partnerships with global semiconductor company Arm and Untether AI for the development of CPU and AI chips, platforms and systems.
“While Bodhi 1 will be introduced in 2026, it will be designed for frontier LLMs, AI inference and fine-tuning, and will have best in class power efficiency,” Aggarwal said. Bodhi 2 will come by 2028 which will be able to support more than 10 trillion parameter models, he said.
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Sarv 1, its cloud native CPU, will be introduced in 2026 while Ojas, an Edge AI chip will power next-generation Ola Electric vehicles, Aggarwal said.
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In response to a question on where the chips would be manufactured, he said: “We haven’t finalised that yet, whether it will be a Taiwanese foundry or not. We’re still in talks with various companies.”The announcement comes days after Ola Electric, the electric vehicle maker founded by Aggarwal, made a successful initial public offering.
“The announced vision and roadmap definitely look appealing, and the timing is apt to impress investors talking about AI and indigenous development of silicon,” said Neil Shah, partner at Counterpoint Research and a technology industry analyst.
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However, the road from design to execution of silicon is going to be a challenging one, he said.
“We need to understand more about IP and foundry tape-out plans which is the first key step. The next challenging step is building the AI software stack where hyperscalars such as AWS, and Azure who have also designed their own chips, are still majorly dependant on Nvidia and AMD for AI workloads, and are years ahead,” he said. “The timeline for chips looks ambitious, and beyond that Ola needs to make the entire stack competitive to attract developers, and be ready for high capital expenditure and operational expenditure with an aggressive business model to be viable and compete well with the top hyperscalars.”
Expansion of Krutrim Cloud
To support growing demand for AI, traditional and cloud-native application workloads, Krutrim Cloud will expand its services to cover infrastructure domains, developer platforms, data platforms, AI models, AI platforms and AI applications.
Krutrim Cloud offers no-code / low-code computing platforms built for Indian use cases, and services such as GPU-as-a-service, model-as-a-service and location services through Ola Maps APIs.
Currently, over 25,000 developers are actively using Krutrim Cloud while 250 billion API calls have been made across products since its launch in early 2024, Aggarwal said.
Additionally, small and medium enterprises and startups have onboarded Krutrim Cloud for various use cases, he said.
The company announced more than 50 new services on Krutrim Cloud. The infrastructure services include virtual machines, cloud storage, security measures for data protection and observability features for precise data monitoring.
It also announced AI pods to enable low-cost access to GPUs, an AI studio for building compound AI applications, model catalogue with LLMs and vision models, and code/low code training, fine tuning, inference and model evaluation capabilities.
Other products that Krutirim announced on Thursday included a language hub with multimodal translation capabilities across text, voice and video to communicate with diverse audiences.
Customer experience AI with multimodal AI agents across mobile apps, phones and WhatsApp for enterprises with support for multiple Indian languages is also available, he said.
Krutrim announced free cloud services worth Rs 100 crore for developers till Diwali, encouraging them to build on its cloud. It also announced free access to cloud services for users of ONDC for one year.
To encourage startups, the company launched ‘Krutrim for Startups’ – Udaan programme with Rs 50 lakh for the first cohort of startups in partnership with investors Z47 (formerly Matrix Partners India), DeVC, and South Park Commons.
Expansion of data centre capacity
To support its AI and cloud initiatives, the company will scale up its data centre capacity to 1 GW by 2028.
Its ambition includes full-stack AI capabilities, comprising foundational models, cloud, and silicon.
