IIT Madras partners with US-based startup to develop AI models to solve grassroots challenges

Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) is partnering with Ziroh Labs, a California-based Innovation-driven Deep-Tech Startup, and IITM Pravartak Technology Foundation to establish an AI Centre of Excellence to solve India’s grassroots challenges. this Centre will develop practical, efficient AI solutions for real-world challenges.
In a major step towards making AI Models solve grassroots problems, Ziroh Labs unveiled the first version of ‘Kompact AI at IIT Madras recently. Kompact AI is an AI platform that enables foundational models to be built and served using CPUs without requiring GPUs (Graphics Processing Units, which are expensive and hard to obtain).
Ziroh Labs has already optimised 17 AI models, including DeepSeek, Qwen and Llama, to run efficiently on CPUs. These models have been benchmarked with IIT Madras, evaluating both quantitative performance and qualitative accuracy. For the first time, high-performance AI is built and deployed efficiently on CPUs, making AI more accessible, scalable, and cost-effective.
Kompact AI enables models to be deployed over CPUs without sacrificing quality and at least 3x performance than the current state of the art, thereby providing GPU-like scale and speed.