NEW DELHI: India’s AI infrastructure push could get more expensive. Nvidia’s reported plan to raise AI server prices by around 15% from next year is expected to increase deployment costs for GPU cloud providers, data-centre operators and companies building large compute clusters, with industry executives warning that some of the increase may ultimately be passed on to customers.The impact could be particularly significant as India scales up AI compute capacity across private data centres, cloud platforms and govt-backed programmes. Higher hardware costs could force operators to reassess expansion plans, delay fresh capacity additions or explore alternative chip architectures.“Nvidia’s pricing is driven largely by demand and component costs, especially memory, which remains tight and is projected to rise through 2027,” said Ishan Talathi, founder and CEO of CloudPe. Talathi said Nvidia had already raised prices of its RTX Pro 6000 series from $13,250 to $16,000 earlier this month, an increase of 20.8% in two months.“For an AI cloud platform like CloudPe, where GPU servers are among the biggest capex items, this translates into a 10-12% increase in overall deployment costs,” he said. CloudPe expects GPU cloud pricing in India to rise by 10-15% over the next 12-18 months unless memory supply improves or alternative architectures gain traction.And, the pressure is not restricted to GPUs. Amit Chaurasia, data infrastructure expert and founder of Dataneers, said sharp increases in prices of memory and storage components were already affecting enterprise buying decisions.“It’s not GPUs but HDDs and RAMs that have quadrupled in price. This is an unprecedented rise,” Chaurasia said, adding that customers were delaying purchases in the hope that prices would ease. While large enterprises may have the financial capacity to absorb higher costs, smaller companies could be more vulnerable. Chaurasia said SMEs were more likely to defer technology investments, while higher hardware costs could have a cascading effect across sectors as technology becomes an increasingly important input for businesses.
