KBE and Vigyanlabs Innovations have launched FEMTO, an indigenous sovereign AI and high-performance computing platform, at JSS College of Pharmacy in Mysuru.

The platform was launched through Kasvin, a joint venture involving KBE subsidiary Krishnaa Advance Systems (KAS) and Vigyanlabs. Dr S. Somanath, former Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), formally launched the platform.

The partners have planned an investment of ₹1 billion over the coming year towards the deployment of FEMTO-based AI infrastructure.

FEMTO is a modular computing platform integrating computing, storage, networking, virtualisation and orchestration within a single air-gapped unit. The platform will be available in four variants and runs on Vigyanlabs' proprietary Virtune orchestration and virtualisation hypervisor.

According to the companies, FEMTO uses IPM+, an intelligent power-management platform developed by Vigyanlabs, to improve energy efficiency.

The FEMTO-4 appliance is designed to support AI models with more than 400 billion parameters and is equipped with eight GPUs and 768 GB of GPU VRAM. The companies said the system operates at under 5.5 kW.

The platform uses a fully air-cooled architecture and does not require water for cooling. KBE and Vigyanlabs said FEMTO has been designed to operate at a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of below 1.3 and could reduce power consumption by up to 50 per cent compared with conventional data centre infrastructure.

The companies also said the technology could reduce data centre capital expenditure by around 30 per cent through lower infrastructure and civil requirements.

The partnership combines Vigyanlabs' technology with KAS' infrastructure execution and data centre deployment capabilities. Under their agreement, KAS has a Right of First Refusal for the commercialisation and deployment of FEMTO-based solutions across identified sectors, including government, defence, enterprise AI, edge computing and data centres.

FEMTO was engineered by Srinivas Varadarajan, CEO of Vigyanlabs and a former technology executive associated with HP and Dell. The venture is being scaled under Rahul Bahl, Managing Director of KBE and KAS.

The launch marks the companies' entry into India's growing market for indigenous AI and high-performance computing infrastructure.