Ola, an Indian automotive manufacturer, has made a significant stride into the AI semiconductor market by announcing its plans to design, build, and launch India’s first-ever in-house AI chip by 2026. This groundbreaking initiative positions India as a player in the rapidly evolving world of AI-powered autonomous vehicles.
Ola CEO Bravish Aggarwal emphasized the importance of India’s self-reliance in AI chip development, highlighting the need to move away from dependence on third-party semiconductor giants like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. This move reflects a growing global trend towards nations seeking technological independence and control over critical technologies.
Ola’s foray into the AI chip market is centered around its ambitious ‘Bodhi’ series of chips, each tailored for specific AI applications. The first in this series, Bodhi 1, is scheduled for release in 2026 and is designed for AI inference and fine-tuning, targeting frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) and vision models.
Ola promises exceptional power efficiency for Bodhi 1, making it a competitive player in the field. Following Bodhi 1, the company plans to launch Bodhi 2 in 2028. Bodhi 2 aims to be a world-leading AI chip, offering best-in-class performance for AI training, inferencing, and fine-tuning.
This chip will support models with over 10 trillion parameters, offering unmatched power efficiency and scalability to exascale supercomputing. Ola’s commitment to innovation is further demonstrated by its novel architecture in AI Intellectual Property (IP), Scaleout IP, and memory hierarchy.
Complementing the Bodhi series, Ola has also unveiled the Sarv-1, a cloud-native AI chip powered by the Arm instruction set. Sarv-1 is designed for high performance and power efficiency, offering optimized Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and slated for release in 2026.
Rounding out Ola’s AI chip portfolio is the Ojas, India’s first Edge AI chip. This chip is built to support a wide edge ecosystem encompassing automotive, extended reality (XR), mobile, internet of things (IoT), and other applications. Ola promises AI-native architecture with best-in-class efficiency for Ojas, coupled with a custom AI operating system and a seamless cloud-to-edge continuum for operation.
This ambitious roadmap for AI chip development positions Ola as a key player in India’s drive to become a leading force in the automotive and AI industries. With its commitment to creating cutting-edge AI technologies and powering the next generation of electric vehicles (EVs), Ola is set to shape the future of mobility and AI in India and beyond.
