DES Pune University signs strategic MoU with Yotta for AI Research

• Students & faculty to gain practical, hands-on experience with the latest GPU technology available in India from Yotta’s Shakti AI Lab

• This strategic partnership opens the potential for faster, large-scale AI compute capabilities, unleashing innovation for DES Pune University

DES Pune University (DES PU) – an institution of Deccan Education Society with a legacy of 140 years and Yotta Data Services, a leading provider of digital transformation services, have entered into an MoU to leverage the next generation “Shakti AI Lab” by Yotta. Shakti AI Lab, a Shakti Cloud service, gives users access to a personalized sandbox with integrated tools, frameworks, data sets and AI courses, and is the fastest way to learn, build and optimise AI models.

This MoU is a part of DES Pune University’s continued commitment to being at the forefront of
research and innovation, providing students and faculty with unparalleled opportunities to collaborate
with industry leaders and contribute to ground breaking advancements.

The MoU was formally signed at DES Pune University, Pune on 26th November 2024, in the presence of Dr. Ravindra Acharya, President DES Pune University and (Sandeep Pathak, Vishal Aggarwal, Mangesh Shigwan and Vishal Patil from Yotta). This partnership marks a significant milestone in bridging the gap between academic research and industry innovation, creating opportunities for both entities to advance their missions.

Dr. Ravindra Acharya, President, DES PU, mentioned, “In this AI-driven world, this is a unique collaboration where DES PU and Yotta have joined hands to provide a platform to equip students for the future opportunities. The AI Lab is one of its kind facilities made available at DES PU taking into account the ever-increasing data and requirement of efficient processing.”

Sunil Gupta, Co-founder, MD & CEO of Yotta Data Services, said “Shakti AI Lab is a transformative platform tailored to the evolving AI skilling requirements of academic and research institutions. Developed with a deep understanding of the challenges universities face, this platform is the result of extensive market insights, crafted to deliver a seamless, efficient, and impactful experience for students and educators.

Equipped with pre-configured, user-friendly templates, the platform simplifies the setup of coding environments, ensuring institutions derive maximum value from their infrastructure investments. Its scalable design enables students to access precise GPU resources, libraries, and storage tailored to their academic needs, optimizing operational efficiency and resource utilization.

Today marks an important milestone for us with the signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in India with the esteemed DES Pune University. Through this partnership, DES PU will gain access to cutting-edge AI capabilities, setting a new benchmark in AI-driven education and driving innovation and excellence in higher learning.”

Shakti AI Lab runs on Yotta’s Shakti Cloud, India’s largest & fastest AI-HPC supercomputer powered by the world’s fastest NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. It is designed for AI developers and innovators to develop, train, and deploy cutting-edge AI models and empowers them to build AI products with enhanced efficiency and agility. Beyond bare metal GPUs, it also encompasses Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, complete with foundational AI models.

Dr. Prasad Khandekar, Vice Chancellor, DES PU added, “Foreseeing the rapidly changing technological
landscape with the advent of AI, DES PU is prompt in forging strategic connections with key organisations in this area. Associating with Yotta Data Services, a leader in AI sovereign cloud infrastructure with its Shakti Cloud platform, is a feather in the cap for DES PU as this collaboration will bring a plethora of internships and projects for students and researchers to gain hands-on experience. Considering the demand of cutting-edge technology for high performance computing equipped with NVIDIA GPUs, the Shakti AI Lab will enable DES PU teachers and studentsto get trained and have access to AI resources. This is need of the hour to exploit computational power required to train and run complex machine learning models to meet the demands of future predictive analysis in an optimized way.”

During the signing of the MoU, Sujeet Naik, Non-Executive Director – 3CITS and CEO – Agribiosys, Registrar of DES PU, Dr Sanjivani Shelke, and senior researchers from DES PU were present including Dr. Prachi Joshi, Dr. Tushar Deshmukh, Dr Poonam Deshpande, Dr. Lalit Kulkarni, and Ms. Swati Satpute.