CHENNAI: The Tamil Nadu government on Tuesday signed an agreement with Sarvam AI to establish India’s first full-stack Sovereign AI Park, positioning the state as a hub for domestically governed artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The memorandum of understanding envisages an initial investment of Rs 10,000 crore and the creation of about 1,000 high-skilled jobs in advanced computing and AI research.
The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was exchanged in the presence of Chief Minister M K Stalin, Industries Minister TRB Rajaa, Indian Institute of Technology Madras Director V Kamakoti and senior officia
According to the government, the park will function as a purpose-built AI district, integrating high-end compute infrastructure, secure data frameworks, model-development labs and innovation clusters, alongside a dedicated institute for AI in governance. Land has been identified near the IIT Madras Research Park.
Rajaa described the initiative as a transformative step aimed at moving Tamil Nadu from a passive adopter of AI to an active shaper of its deployment.
The project seeks to ensure that data, models and computing power remain within a defined sovereign trust boundary, addressing concerns around data security, ethics and public accountability. The platform is expected to support large-scale AI applications across education, healthcare, agriculture and citizen services.
The park will also emphasise linguistic and cultural context, with plans to develop Tamil-first foundational models—envisioned as a modern “Digital Sangam”—linking classical language resources with contemporary applications.
Academia will play a central role. Kamakoti said anchoring sovereign AI infrastructure and frontier research in the state would enable students and researchers to become global creators of AI technologies.
Under the MoU, a large data centre will be set up near IIT Madras, with public data digitised to support evidence-based policymaking, evaluation of outcomes and wider use by the private sector.
For Sarvam AI—selected under the Union government’s IndiaAI Mission to build India’s first sovereign large language model—the partnership offers a pathway from experimentation to deployment at scale.
Co-founder Pratyush Kumar said the project would bring together compute, talent, startups and government to deliver AI systems trained, governed and deployed from Tamil Nadu.
“At present, we rely on foreign models—exporting our data and importing intelligence. That is neither sustainable nor desirable,” Kumar said. “We need our own AI capacity—GPUs, compute, models and applications—which this MoU will deliver.” The investment, he added, will be primarily focused on compute infrastructure and GPUs.