Ola will Save INR 15 Crore Annually Using Krutrim AI Cloud
Ola’s decision to use Krutrim AI Cloud instead of Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud infrastructure is going to save them approximately INR 15 crore annually. “Cloud costs are crazy. He [Bhavish Aggarwal] basically used to burn INR 5 lakh per day, which is quite a bit of money,” said Sasank Chilamkurthy, the founder of Qure AI and Von Neumann AI (the company building a personal AI server JOHNAIC), in an exclusive interview with AIM. Chilamkurthy swiftly did some number-crunching and came out with the estimation that it costs about INR 8.2-10 crore to buy servers that will handle the current load of Ola on Azure. Had they not migrated, the expense over three years would have totalled INR 54.74 crore. The difference, INR 54.75 crore minus INR 8.2 crore, amounts to about INR 45 crore, translating to a substantial savings of roughly INR 15 crore annually. Assuming a company uses an AWS g4dn.4xlarge instance and reserves it for three years, it would cost them INR 10-25 lakh for a specific instance, according to Chilamkurty. According to estimates and disclosures by the Ola chief on X, this shift could lead to a daily revenue loss of INR 5-25 lakh for Microsoft Azure and INR 30-40 lakh for AWS.  Annually, this could translate to approximately INR 18.25-91.25 crore for Azure and INR 109.5-146 crore for AWS. Moreover, according to Chilamkurthy, Ola spent around INR 85 lakh on egress costs paid to Azure. Egress cost is the charge levied by cloud providers for moving or transferring data from the cloud storage where it was earlier uploaded. Chilamkurthy told AIM that he recently bumped into Aggarwal at a cafe, where he pitched JOHNAIC for Krutrim AI Cloud. He said that Aggarwal showed some interest in JOHNAIC, partly because it also utilises Intel GPUs. He further revealed that Ola Krutrim will buy Intel Gaudi 2 to build Krutrim AI Cloud. In a recent post, Aggarwal said that over 2,500 developers have signed up for Krutrim Cloud services, and they will work with everyone to onboard them in the coming weeks. Most recently, Aggarwal met Arm chief Rene Haas in Taiwan. JOHNAIC Cloud in a Box Von Neumann AI recently launched JOHNAIC, described as a “cloud in a box” solution. It provides the benefits of cloud computing, such as scalability and flexibility, but within a local, on-premises environment. This hybrid approach combines the best of both worlds—cloud capabilities with local data control. It comes with the following hardware configurations: an Intel i5 12400 CPU, an Intel Arc 770 16 GB GPU, 64 GB of RAM, a 1 TB SSD, and an optional 1100 VA UPS. “We have sachetised AI into small boxes so that you can personalise them and take them wherever you want,” said Chilamkurthy. It claims to slash AI costs by 85% and comes with in-built SaaS and AI tools to run SMEs and startups. JOHNAIC comes with Ubuntu, Matrix, and ERPNext, supports oneAPI, and can run Meta Llama. “JOHNAIC is a one-time investment of around INR 2 lakh, resulting in 80-92% savings,” said Chilamkurthy, adding that users don’t need to buy an Apple MacBook to run AI applications, which comes at a similar price. Chilamkurthy is currently targeting the inference market with JOHNAIC. “It is very reasonable and affordable for most folks and startups trying to do something cool using OpenAI GPT’s APIs,” he said. People+AI is the first customer of JOHNAIC and is using it for its own AI requirements while keeping its data private. Compared to public cloud services like AWS, JOHNAIC offers a highly competitive pricing model making it an attractive option for businesses looking to reduce their AI infrastructure costs while maintaining robust capabilities. “Even on AWS, you cannot really buy just one NVIDIA A100, you have to purchase it in a set of eight GPUs, which I think is really expensive. For most people, one A100 would be sufficient, and they would just run it for a week,” said Chilamkurthy. Lately, Intel is aggressively targeting India, aiming to seize the market share created by the unavailability of NVIDIA GPUs. “I don’t use NVIDIA because I believe they overcharge us. They don’t offer small packets like sachets, instead, they push for large server purchases,” said Chilamkurthy. [Updated] June 4, 2024, 17:21 | The article has been updated to show that it costs about INR 8.2-10 Cr to buy servers that will handle the current load of Ola on Azure.
Bhavish Aggarwal recently met Arm chief Rene Haas in Taiwan.
Ola’s decision to use Krutrim AI Cloud instead of Microsoft Azure and AWS cloud infrastructure is going to save them approximately INR 15 crore annually. 
["Ola Krutrim"]
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["AI", "OpenAI", "Aim", "RAG", "cloud computing", "AWS", "Azure", "R", "Go", "Scala"]
Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.