IBM Expands Research Partnerships in India to Drive AI and Quantum Computing Advancements

IBM has strengthened its research partnerships with two prominent Indian institutions to advance artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. The tech giant's collaborations with the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) will focus on agentic AI, sovereign AI, quantum computing, and next-generation computing infrastructure.

The IIT Bombay partnership began in 2018 and has been expanded to include work on sovereign and Indic language model adaptation, multimodal AI, AI infrastructure, and knowledge retrieval. Researchers plan to improve multilingual AI for Indian languages through more efficient model adaptation and optimization.

The collaboration will also explore multimodal systems for software programming education, human-AI collaboration, and intelligent operations across hybrid cloud environments. Additionally, the team will work on improving enterprise knowledge retrieval and optimizing AI runtimes and distributed inference for large language models.

IISc's partnership with IBM began in 2021 and has been expanded to include research on agentic systems, AI for scientific and industrial applications, and quantum computing. The focus will be on developing agentic workflows capable of orchestrating applications across hybrid cloud environments while balancing performance, cost, and operational complexity.

The researchers plan to develop lightweight time-series foundation models based on IBM's Granite model family for energy forecasting, anomaly detection, load disaggregation, and optimization. In quantum computing, IBM and IISc will investigate quantum and high-performance computing orchestration and quantum-centric supercomputing workflows.