Sarvam AI plans a one-trillion-parameter foundational model after opening San Francisco research capacity and raising a $234 million Series B first close at about $1.5 billion, The Hindu reported. The Bengaluru lab already ships Epoch Builder models for Indian languages and says a custom Indic tokenizer cuts fertility to roughly 1.2 to 2 tokens per word. It leans on open-weight distillation, mixture-of-experts routing, and on-prem deployments for sensitive data. Why it matters: India wants sovereign scale without Silicon Valley GPU budgets. Caveat: a trillion-parameter run remains unproven for Sarvam's capital and chip access.