AP ties up with IBM, BharatGen & NxtGen for Swadeshi AI stack

Hyderabad: The Andhra Pradesh govt has partnered with tech giant IBM, BharatGen and NxtGen to develop a ‘Swadeshi AI stack', a sovereign artificial intelligence framework aimed at delivering citizen-centric services in Telugu and other regional languages. The collaboration was announced at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi on Friday.The govt said the initiative will integrate AI models, govt and external datasets, software platforms and deployment tools into a unified system that can run on sovereign cloud platforms or on-premises data centres. The goal is to strengthen governance and improve service delivery across priority sectors while ensuring that data and operational control remain within Indian jurisdiction.Under the collaboration, IBM, BharatGen and NxtGen will provide technical and strategic guidance on the stack's design, architecture and operating model. IBM will contribute expertise in data and AI, hybrid cloud, governance, automation and security, focusing on scaling and securing AI workloads while enabling oversight and compliance by design.BharatGen will provide multilingual foundation models developed in India, including native support for Telugu and other Indian languages. It will also work on post-trained text, speech, and vision models to support govt departments, start-ups, academia and industry in building public-facing applications.NxtGen will offer India-hosted sovereign cloud and GPU infrastructure optimised for AI training and inference, along with deployment environments designed to meet data localisation, security and operational compliance requirements.Andhra Pradesh IT minister Nara Lokesh said the partnership will help create a "sovereign, citizen-first AI ecosystem" and position the state as a national leader in responsible and applied AI, while enabling secure, inclusive and hyper-personalised public services. IBM India and South Asia managing director Sandip Patel said indigenous models and sovereign infrastructure are key to scaling adoption while tailoring services to local needs.