Mumbai, 17 September 2025: IBM (NYSE: IBM) and BharatGen today announced a strategic collaboration to advance the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in India, powered by BharatGen's sovereign large language models (LLMs) tailored to India's unique linguistic and cultural landscape. The collaboration brings together IBM's AI expertise in data, governance and model training technology with BharatGen's national mandate and expertise, to create inclusive, India-centric sovereign AI models rooted in indigenous context and values.
The collaboration focuses on developing and scaling language-specific AI models and expanding their applications across sectors including education, agriculture, banking, healthcare and citizen services. As part of this collaboration, BharatGen and IBM will aim to:
- Develop solution templates for Indic use cases, using BharatGen's models and data with IBM's AI technologies, including IBM Granite models.
- Create demonstrations and use case templates (RAG and targeted domains) on IBM watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift AI.
- Build a scalable data pipeline using selected IBM open-source tools, enhanced with Indic-specific capabilities to streamline data preparation workflows, and implement a governance framework based on IBM's enterprise-scale model development methodology to strengthen responsible model development.
- Create new benchmarks suited to Indic domains and languages.
- Research new and emerging model architectures and technologies, drawing on IBM's and BharatGen's experience in high-performance, purpose-built generative AI models.
“At BharatGen, we have been building sovereign AI models and the ecosystem that reflects the linguistic richness, cultural nuances, and diverse needs of our people. This collaboration with IBM allows us to bring cutting-edge global research, scalable architectures and inclusive systems for India,” said Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, BharatGen. “With IBM's strength in enterprise-grade platforms and our commitment to public-good AI, we are on a path to drive transformative solutions for empowering India's digital journey across domains such as agriculture, finance, education, and governance.”
“At IBM, we are committed to support the creation of open, trusted AI that solves real-world problems,” said Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India and South Asia. “Through our collaboration with BharatGen, we aim to advance sovereign AI capabilities that reflect India's diversity and deliver meaningful impact across sectors.”
BharatGen's roadmap for LLMs and foundation models is designed to address both national and commercial needs across agriculture, education, healthcare, national security and finance. A key priority is the inclusion of underserved Indian languages and dialects beyond the top 12–22, ensuring broader digital participation and equity.
About BharatGen
BharatGen is an AI company anchored at the Technology Innovation Hub at IIT Bombay, building AI models for Indian languages across text, speech and vision. It is backed by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India. Its mandate is to build AI for the nation by developing efficient AI models for Indian languages, creating a multilingual data repository, fostering public-private partnerships for scalable AI, and strengthening India's AI talent pool and startup ecosystem. BharatGen is building a family of AI models across text, speech and vision to serve diverse needs in India, including representing underserved languages, creating sovereign models for self-reliance, and partnering to build solutions of national importance across sectors.
About IBM
IBM is a leading provider of global hybrid cloud and AI, and consulting expertise. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalise on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Thousands of government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and consulting deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's long-standing commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service. Visit www.ibm.com for more information.
Media: contact@bharatgen.com
