NPCI, NVIDIA partner to build scalable sovereign AI layer for India’s digital payments ecosystem

The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is stepping up its artificial intelligence (AI) strategy as it looks to build a foundational, scalable AI layer for India’s fast-growing digital payments ecosystem. As part of this next phase, NPCI is collaborating with NVIDIA to strengthen sovereign AI capabilities that can support population-scale, real-time payment systems while meeting stringent requirements around trust, resilience, performance, and data sovereignty.

India today operates one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated digital payments infrastructures, processing billions of transactions every month through platforms such as UPI. According to Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, Asia South at NVIDIA, the scale and complexity of this ecosystem make advanced computing essential. “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,” Dhupar said. “With accelerated computing and AI, we aim to strengthen India's fintech infrastructure while enabling responsible innovation across the ecosystem,” he added.

NPCI said the collaboration reflects its intent to move beyond narrowly defined, use-case-specific AI deployments toward a more comprehensive AI foundation that can serve the entire payments ecosystem. Until now, NPCI’s AI initiatives have largely been driven by operational needs associated with managing high transaction volumes and ensuring system reliability. A recent example is the UPI Help Assistant, which was piloted to improve grievance redressal by delivering faster and more consistent responses to users at scale.

Going forward, NPCI plans to build a payments-native AI architecture that can support a wide range of use cases across trust frameworks, fraud detection, grievance redressal, operational intelligence, and system optimisation. The proposed approach is expected to explore advanced techniques such as Mixture of Experts (MoE), which are well-suited for high-volume, low-latency environments like digital payments. Over time, the AI layer is also expected to expand across multilingual datasets and agent-optimised systems, reflecting the linguistic and geographic diversity of India’s user base.

A central element of the initiative is the focus on sovereignty and regulatory alignment. NPCI has said that any AI models developed as part of this collaboration will be aligned with India’s regulatory framework and data sovereignty requirements, ensuring that sensitive financial data, models, and decision-making processes remain within the country. This is particularly important for a system that underpins everyday economic activity for millions of citizens and businesses.

Through this collaboration, NPCI said it remains committed to strengthening the underlying digital public infrastructure for payments. The objective is not only to address current operational challenges but also to support long-term stability, efficiency, and innovation across the ecosystem. By creating a common AI foundation, NPCI aims to enable banks, fintech firms, and other ecosystem participants to innovate on top of a secure and trusted platform, while maintaining safeguards around data security and responsible AI use.

Industry observers see this move as part of a broader shift in India’s digital strategy, where AI is increasingly being embedded into core public infrastructure rather than treated as a standalone layer. With transaction volumes continuing to rise and user expectations around speed, reliability, and dispute resolution becoming more demanding, NPCI’s transition to a scalable AI foundation could play a critical role in ensuring that India’s digital payments ecosystem remains robust and future-ready.

As NPCI enters this next phase of its AI journey, the emphasis remains clear: leveraging advanced AI and accelerated computing to reinforce trust, resilience, and performance, while enabling innovation that is responsible, inclusive, and aligned with India’s long-term digital and economic priorities.