IIT Madras and the IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation have partnered with California-based Ziroh Labs to establish the Centre of AI Research (CoAIR) to solve India’s compute accessibility challenges using AI models optimised for CPUs and edge devices.
The announcement was made during an event held at IIT Madras, where Ziroh Labs unveiled the first version of Kompact AI, an AI platform that enables foundational models to be built and served on CPUs, eliminating the need for GPUs.
The collaboration is aligned with India’s ‘AI for All’ mission. Kompact AI has been developed by Indian scientists and engineers and is already capable of running 17 optimised models, including DeepSeek, Qwen and Llama, on CPUs. These have been benchmarked for both performance and accuracy in collaboration with IIT Madras.
“By making AI models executable on CPUs, we are unlocking the potential of AI without the heavy infrastructure costs typically associated with GPUs,” Madhusudhanan Baskaran, principal consultant at IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation, said. “Through the CoAIR, we will build specific, actionable AI models that can be deployed at scale, benefiting people in rural and underserved areas.”
V Kamakoti, director of IIT Madras, said the initiative reflects a nature-inspired approach.“They provide a platform that uses customised and trained domain-specific models to provide accurate inferences on affordable conventional compute machines. This is a major step in arresting the possible AI divide between one who can afford the modern hyperscalar systems and one who cannot.”
Ziroh Labs demonstrated Kompact AI’s capabilities at the event, which was attended by dignitaries including Turing awardee Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy, and others from academia and industry. The platform supports offline operation, making it suitable for deployment in remote regions with limited internet access.
Hrishikesh Dewan and Igneta DSouza, co-founders of Ziroh Labs, stated, “For AI to benefit everyone, it must be accessible, affordable, and adaptable to real-world conditions. Kompact AI is designed for such needs and operates efficiently on CPUs, optimised for task-specific applications.”
Kompact AI includes a model library spanning text, speech, vision and multimodal models, all tuned to run on CPUs. It also provides a runtime environment—Common AI-Language Runtime (ICAN)—that supports over 10 programming languages for developers to work with these models.
The platform specifically targets models with fewer than 50 billion parameters, optimising inference and fine-tuning without compromising quality. “Anything that can be computed on a GPU can also be calculated on a CPU,” the release noted. Kompact AI avoids the common drawbacks of quantised and distilled models, which typically trade off accuracy for efficiency.
Sowmya Narayanan Sadagopan, former director of IIIT Bangalore, noted, “By combining the availability of AI development and deployment tools using CPUs, Kompact AI proves India can do frugal innovation at the cutting edge of technology. Such a solution using far less electrical power is sustainable.”
Meanwhile, Apoorv Iyer, executive vice president at HCLTech, said the company will partner with Ziroh Labs in this initiative. “We congratulate Ziroh Labs on its AI CPU launch, which promises to significantly increase the accessibility of AI.”
CoAIR aims to support specific use cases such as agriculture, education, and rural healthcare by deploying smaller, task-specific models on conventional devices.
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