CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu govt led by chief minister C Joseph Vijay is likely to announce a renewed AI mission and an AI city, modelled as a self-contained unit with a 1,000-acre campus, integrating office facilities, AI model development, research and global capability centres and residential amenities such as parks and sports facilities.It is now part of budget deliberations and govt is in discussion with stakeholders and studying similar efforts undertaken by states such as Telangana, according to four sources aware of the development. The govt could also announce a scheme for subsidised AI compute access for startups and individual developers in the state.The AI city could be jointly developed by TIDCO and the industries department and the initiative would be separate from the AI park announced by DMK govt in Jan.Earlier, speaking at an event, state AI minister R Kumar said govt was planning an AI city with a complete ecosystem ranging from creches to universities and facilities for global capability centres. He said govt had shortlisted a few land parcels near Chennai and that the AI city would have more than 3,000 acres once fully operational. It would also have branches across 16 districts, with centres of excellence focused on AI skilling and workforce development.“The idea behind this is to make Tamil Nadu globally competitive in AI, as the technology will play a central role in future economic growth. It would also have world-class residential amenities that would attract the diaspora and foreign talent, while preventing talent flight,” Kumar said at FICCI’s digital summit. However, he declined to divulge further details.It comes at a time when Tamil Nadu is perceived as lagging in the digital and startup economy and having a lower density of AI talent. The TVK poll manifesto has promised a self-contained AI City called ‘Arivagam’ with universities, semiconductor labs and world-class residential facilities.TOI has learned that the govt is at present continuing the project started by its predecessor and is holding regular discussions, officials said on condition of anonymity. The partnership with Sarvam and IIT Madras is for setting up AI data centres and Tamil-focused large language model (indic LLM) and governance-related application development. But govt is reviewing the broader AI park initiatives and expects to take a call on a case-by-case basis, a senior govt representative said on condition of anonymity.The previous DMK govt planned an AI park with an integrated compute cluster, research and office spaces targeting AI infrastructure, including power, data centres and GPUs. It also held discussions with chip supplier Nvidia and major business houses for GPU procurement at scale.
