India Activates NSM 2.0: A Unified HPC–AI–Quantum Push Toward Exascale

India has taken a decisive step in the global compute race by activating the second phase of its National Supercomputing Mission (NSM 2.0) at the Supercomputing India 2025 summit hosted at MIT–MAHE, Bengaluru. Branded around the theme of converging high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies, the initiative aims to move India from being a consumer of imported supercomputers to a designer and manufacturer of its own end-to-end compute stack.​

At the heart of the announcements were 11 new memoranda of understanding signed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) with universities and research institutes spanning India and partners abroad. These MoUs are designed to seed new HPC and quantum labs, strengthen faculty capacity, and give students hands-on access to indigenous hardware and software, thus creating a nationwide talent grid aligned with the mission’s long-term goals.​

The summit also highlighted concrete product launches that anchor India’s sovereign compute ambitions, including the Topsc.in learning platform and VEGA-powered development hardware such as the VSDSquadron Ultra RISC-V board. By pairing domestic processor families with open architectures and industry collaborations, policymakers and engineers are working to ensure that future AI models, climate simulations, and scientific workloads run on infrastructure that is both locally controlled and globally competitive.​

A high-profile panel of leaders from AMD, Fujitsu, Intel, AWS, and C-DAC reinforced that the road to exascale and eventually zettascale will be shaped less by individual chips and more by heterogeneous systems optimized for power, cooling, and data movement. Speakers stressed that CPUs, GPUs, AI accelerators, FPGAs, and quantum processors will need to function as a tightly integrated fabric, with energy efficiency and storage interconnects becoming as critical as raw floating-point performance.​

For India, NSM 2.0 serves as both a technology roadmap and an industrial policy instrument, tying together ministries, national labs, private cloud providers, and academic institutions under a common compute architecture. As the mission scales out more supercomputers and indigenous boards into sectors such as healthcare, climate, agriculture, and defense, it is expected to form the backbone of the country’s AI ambitions and cement its role in the emerging global HPC–AI–quantum ecosystem.​

Source: AIM Network – “India Activates NSM 2.0 — A Unified HPC + AI + Quantum Roadmap to Exascale”