IBM and Sarvam AI join hands to build sovereign AI for India

IBM and Sarvam AI have announced a partnership to build sovereign AI solutions for Indian government bodies and regulated industries such as banking, healthcare and telecom.

Under the agreement, IBM Sovereign Core provides the software and middleware layer needed to deploy and govern AI systems inside India, while Sarvam contributes its reasoning models and multilingual voice and language technologies built specifically for Indian users.

Why it matters

Regulated Indian institutions increasingly want AI that runs on infrastructure they control, with auditable governance and support for Indian languages. The combination of a global platform stack with India-first models gives public sector teams a credible route to deploy assistants, document intelligence and voice services without moving data offshore.

Sarvam, founded in 2023 by Vivek Raghavan and Pratyush Kumar, has been one of the flagbearers of the IndiaAI Mission's push for homegrown foundation models.