New Delhi, May 15 -- India will begin trials of its first homemade graphic processing units before the end of this year, two senior officials familiar with the matter said, crossing a milestone in the development of components at the heart of artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

The chips will be general-purpose GPUs, or GPGPUs, with the potential use across a wide range of tasks. In the long run, the goal is to replace chips from global giants such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm in data centres, AI model training, analytics, cloud platforms, supercomputers and critical communications infrastructure, among others.

"About 29 prototypes of these indigenous GPGPUs will be produced in India by the end of this y...