Iran making heavy investment in buying GPUs: Official
A senior Iranian government official says the country is making heavy investments in buying graphics processing units (GPUs) as part of efforts to expand the country's artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure.
Hossein Afshin, who serves as Iranian deputy president for science and technology, said on Monday that buying a considerable number of GPUs in recent months had enabled the country to create a major calculation infrastructure that can suit its growing AI needs.
Afshin said that his department had allocated a considerable part of its resources to buying GPUs.
“We can claim that we have a very good calculation infrastructure in the country,” he said while in a briefing in the Iranian parliament.
Apart from their original usage to process digital images and to accelerate computer graphics, GPUs have proven to be very useful and rapid in performing vast numbers of calculations. That has led to their adoption in AI where they can carry out data-intensive and computationally demanding tasks.
Afshin said that the office for science and technology of the Iranian presidency, which is separate from Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT), has created a home-grown AI platform in a joint project with a major Iranian university.
The official added that 12 universities and nearly 20 technology companies from across Iran have joined the platform.
He had also said earlier this year that Iran would launch its first GPU farm in April or May to respond to the growing need for computational power among researchers, industries, and startups in the country.
Iran has announced plans and investments in recent months to boost its AI infrastructure as it seeks to catch up with the global progress in AI.
The country has also introduced major projects to help AI’s expansion in government institutions and private companies.
Iran’s sovereign wealth fund said in November that it will earmark $115 million in loans and grants to universities and research centers working on AI projects with the MSRT being responsible for supervising the implementation of the projects and how the funding will be used.
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