New Delhi: Google Cloud and Google DeepMind on Tuesday announced a partnership with IIT Madras to launch Indic Arena, a public platform that allows Indian users to anonymously evaluate and rank AI models based on tasks specific to the country’s diverse linguistic landscape.
The initiative, run by the AI4Bharat centre at IIT Madras, will be powered by Google Cloud credits, the company said in a statement.
Google also unveiled an expansion of its local AI hardware capacity in India, “powered by Google’s AI Hypercomputer architecture with the latest Trillium TPUs,” enabling more businesses and public sector organisations to train and deploy advanced Gemini models within India.
The company said the move will help address data residency and sovereignty requirements, while inviting startups, universities, government agencies, and enterprises to leverage the new capacity for Gemini on Vertex AI.
The Indic LLM-Arena is a crowd-sourced, human-in-the-loop leaderboard designed to benchmark large language models (LLMs) on three key parameters central to the Indian experience — language, context, and safety.
“At AI4Bharat, our mission is to build AI tailored to India’s specific needs. A key part of this effort is to create a neutral, standardised benchmark that measures model performance across our many languages,” said Mitesh Khapra, Associate Professor at IIT Madras.
In a statement, IIT Madras noted: “A model’s ability to converse flawlessly in English is meaningless if it cannot understand a farmer in rural Maharashtra, gives a culturally insensitive reply to a user in Sikkim, or struggles with a Tanglish query from a student in Tamil Nadu.”
Earlier this year, Google Cloud enabled regulated Indian customers to access Gemini by deploying Gemini 2.5 Flash with local machine learning processing support.
