IIT Madras, in collaboration with the IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation and California-based Ziroh Labs, has launched the Centre of AI Research (CoAIR) to address compute accessibility challenges in India. The initiative was announced at a dedicated event on the IIT Madras campus, where Ziroh Labs also unveiled Kompact AI, a platform enabling foundational AI models to run efficiently on CPUs instead of GPUs.
Aligned with India’s ‘AI for All’ mission, Kompact AI is designed to work on edge devices and low-cost infrastructure. It currently supports 17 optimised models, including DeepSeek, Qwen, and Llama, benchmarked for both performance and accuracy in collaboration with IIT Madras.
Bridging the AI Divide Through CPU-Based Deployment
By making AI models executable on CPUs, CoAIR aims to bring AI capabilities to underserved regions, bypassing the high infrastructure costs associated with GPUs. “We are unlocking the potential of AI without the heavy infrastructure costs,” said Madhusudhanan Baskaran of IITM Pravartak. IIT Madras Director V Kamakoti noted this approach prevents the emergence of an AI divide, making innovation accessible across socio-economic boundaries.
Kompact AI supports offline deployment, critical for remote areas with limited internet. The platform features a model library covering text, speech, vision, and multimodal applications, and includes a runtime (ICAN) supporting over 10 programming languages. Designed for models under 50 billion parameters, Kompact AI delivers inference without compromising quality or relying on quantisation or distillation methods.
Also read: Chhattisgarh Gets First Semiconductor Plant
Industry Endorsement and Real-World Applications
The event attracted notable dignitaries including Turing Award winner Whitfield Diffie and Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy. “This solution, using far less power, is sustainable,” said Sowmya Narayanan Sadagopan, former director of IIIT Bangalore.
Ziroh Labs co-founders Hrishikesh Dewan and Igneta DSouza emphasised the goal of creating AI that is “accessible, affordable, and adaptable to real-world conditions.” HCLTech’s executive vice president Apoorv Iyer announced the company’s partnership with Ziroh Labs to support the platform.
CoAIR is expected to develop and deploy task-specific models for critical sectors such as agriculture, education, and rural healthcare—advancing the promise of inclusive and decentralised AI in India.
