NPCI Taps NVIDIA to Build Sovereign AI Model for India’s Digital Payments

The National Payments Corporation of India has partnered with NVIDIA to advance sovereign AI model capabilities tailored to the country’s digital payments ecosystem.

The collaboration centres on building a payments-native AI foundation model aligned with India’s regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.

NPCI will use the NVIDIA Nemotron family of open models, including open weights, training data and recipes, as part of its development approach.

The initiative marks a shift from use-case–specific AI tools toward a scalable foundational layer designed for high-volume, low-latency payment environments.

It combines NPCI’s experience operating population-scale, real-time payment systems with NVIDIA’s AI and accelerated computing platforms.

The next phase will explore architectures such as Mixture of Experts to manage multilingual datasets and agent-optimised systems at scale.

NPCI said the platform is intended to support trust frameworks, grievance redressal and operational intelligence, while maintaining safeguards around data security, sovereignty and responsible AI governance.

The move builds on NPCI’s pilot of the UPI Help Assistant, supported by FiMI, the Financial Model for India, a fine-tuned Small Language Model developed for the payments ecosystem to improve grievance resolution for users.

Vishal Kanvaty, Chief Technology Officer, NPCI, said,

“Through this collaboration with NVIDIA, NPCI aims to advance AI capabilities designed specifically for India’s payments ecosystem. Drawing from our experience of operating population-scale, real-time payment systems, this initiative is designed to create a sovereign, payments-native AI foundation that strengthens trust, resilience, and security, while remaining aligned with India’s regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.

As we evolve from use-case–led AI deployments to a foundational and scalable AI layer, our focus remains on enabling the broader ecosystem to innovate responsibly through robust governance frameworks and secure, future-ready infrastructure.”

“India has one of the most advanced digital payment systems in the world that operates at population scale where trust, resilience, and performance are fundamental.

With accelerated computing and AI, we aim to strengthen India’s fintech infrastructure while enabling responsible innovation across the ecosystem,”

said Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Asia South, NVIDIA.

Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by wahyu_t via Freepik