India’s Rural AI Training: The “Cloud Farming” Revolution is Changing the World’s Tech Map

• The town of Virudhunagar in southeastern India—famous for its thousand-year-old ancient temples—has now become an AI training hub where people like Mohan Kumar label data and train models to recognize and predict objects.
• The “cloud farming” trend—moving IT and AI operations to rural areas—helps reduce costs and create local jobs, instead of forcing young people to migrate to cities.
• Desicrew, founded in 2005, is a pioneer of this model. About 30–40% of their current work is AI-related, and this is expected to increase to 75–100% in the next few years.
• 70% of Desicrew’s workforce are women; for many, this is their first job, providing a stable income and educational opportunities for their children.
• NextWealth, founded in 2008, now has 5,000 employees in 11 offices located in small towns. 60% of its staff are female, and 70% of its revenue comes from US clients.
• The company has shifted from back-office services to AI training and validation, serving systems ranging from ChatGPT to facial recognition.
• Mythily Ramesh, CEO of NextWealth, predicts that in the next 3–5 years, AI and generative AI will create about 100 million jobs related to training, validation, and real-time processing.
• Expert KS Viswanathan notes: “Silicon Valley builds the AI engines, but it’s the towns of India that run them.” However, challenges remain with internet speed and data security concerns in rural areas.
• Employee Dhanalakshmi Vijay “fine-tunes” AI by correcting recognition errors between similar-looking objects—a process like applying a patch that makes the model smarter and more accurate.

📌 The “cloud farming” trend—moving IT and AI operations to rural areas—helps reduce costs and create local jobs, instead of forcing young people to migrate to cities. India’s rural towns are becoming global AI training centers thanks to the cloud farming model, providing jobs for millions—especially women. With its large, low-cost workforce, India may maintain a 5–7 year advantage over other countries like the Philippines before the gap narrows.