India cuts NVIDIA B200 to ₹290/hr

IndiaAI cut the benchmark rental for Nvidia’s B200 graphics processors to ₹290.70 an hour in its fourth compute tender. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) The new rate is down 10% from ₹323 in the third round, according to the letter of intent issued on April 24. Eight-chip B200 setups were cut to ₹2,325.60 an hour from ₹2,584. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) IndiaAI’s public price list now shows Nvidia B200 SXM at ₹323 an hour on demand, with lower reserved rates of ₹308 for one month, ₹293 for six months, and ₹279 for 12 months. (compute.indiaai.gov.in) The tender matters because IndiaAI is the government program meant to widen access to advanced artificial-intelligence computing, not just buy chips for one agency. The mission says its compute-capacity pillar is building a public-private pool of more than 10,000 graphics processors. (indiaai.gov.in) Those processors are the rented engines used to train and run large language models, the systems behind chatbots, coding tools, and image generators. Cheaper hourly access lowers the upfront cost for Indian startups, universities, and researchers that cannot buy clusters outright. (indiaai.gov.in) (economictimes.indiatimes.com) The fourth-round letter covered continuous empanelment for compute, networking, storage, and parallel file systems. Companies that were not the lowest bidder in a category were asked to match the discovered lowest rate to stay empanelled. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) Economic Times reported that nine companies cleared the technical round, including Tata Communications, Netmagic IT Services, E2E Networks, Yotta Data Services, Sify Digital Services, and UrsaCompute. Providers must make at least 1,000 artificial-intelligence compute units available within six months of the letter of intent. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) Some bidders said the lower pricing could squeeze margins as memory costs rise and the rupee weakens. RackBank Datacenters chief executive Narendra Sen said the benchmarks were still highly competitive against global Blackwell graphics-processor pricing. (economictimes.indiatimes.com) IndiaAI has set a May 5 response deadline for the latest empanelment round. The immediate test is whether providers accept the lower rates and still deliver the promised capacity. (economictimes.indiatimes.com)