Karnataka Unveils India’s First Open-Source AI PC for the Ma…

Karnataka on Monday unveiled KEO, an AI-powered, fully open-source personal computer developed under the state’s electronics, IT & BT department in partnership with the Karnataka State Electronics Development Corporation Ltd (KEONICS). 

The device, India’s most affordable PC with an onboard AI core, marks what the government is calling a milestone in democratising access to computing and artificial intelligence.

Ahead of the official launch on November 18 by chief minister Siddaramaiah and deputy CM DK Shivakumar at the Bengaluru Tech Summit, Karnataka IT minister Priyank Kharge called KEO “world’s first (such) initiative taken up by a state.”

Explaining the rationale behind it, Kharge said accessibility to smartphone, internet is more than 90% but when it comes to serious online learning or computing, there is not enough affordable hardware in urban, tier-2 towns or rural areas.

This gap leaves students from these areas out of the learning bracket, though India’s digital economy is growing at a fast pace, he added.

“The idea is to take computing to the grassroots and make it more affordable, not just learning,” he said.

Kharge said KEO stands for Knowledge-driven, Economical and Open Source. “It is not a luxury device, it is an inclusive device,” he said, adding that it took just a year for the government to unveil KEO.

Kharge said KEONICS is doing what it is supposed to do after getting deviated in the past, when it “missed the previous electronic revolution”. 

“The department of IT and BT and KEONICS will be accelerating the future of electronics and AI for India from Karnataka,” he stressed.

Stating that the government wants to make Karnataka the RISC-V capital of India, Kharge shared the vision to turn Karnataka into a hub of processor designing and architecture testing, where new AI hardware solutions are built for the world.

Inside KEO

KEONICS chairman Sharath Bachegowda said the project represents “inclusion, innovation and access to computing at the grassroots.”

The KEO has been engineered entirely in Bengaluru, from chip design to device architecture. Its RISC-V based processor and Linux-Ubuntu operating system make it one of the country’s first end-to-end open-source personal computers.

“The ethos of KEO is open source,” Bachegowda said. 

He added: “We asked ourselves: How can we get out of the proprietary ecosystem? How can we build a new ecosystem where students, rural innovators and young creators can build technology instead of just consuming it?”

Every component and tool, from the OS to AI models, programming environments, and productivity suites, is open-source and licence-free.

A defining feature of KEO is its 4-TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) edge AI engine, enabling local AI computation without relying on the cloud.

“This is India’s first AI PC capable of four trillion operations per second,” Bachegowda said. “We’ve created a solution where AI is deployed on the edge, programming, inference, and even LLM computation can happen offline, on a compact device.”

KEO also includes an AI chatbot called Buddh trained exclusively on the state DSERT curriculum, offering instant academic assistance for students from Classes 8 to 12. “Students can ask questions in science, maths or social science and get answers within a fraction of a second,” he said.

KEO’s development took nearly a year, with repeated hardware iterations and field tests aimed at ensuring ruggedness and reliability in rural environments.

Connectivity options include 4G, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB-A and C ports, HDMI, and audio jacks.

Cost was treated as a core engineering priority. “We’ve kept affordability as a high mark,” he said. “This is a mass computing solution, every feature of a modern computer in a compact, low-cost form factor.”

Broad applicability

The initiative has already secured early buy-in: Shikshana Foundation, an education-focused organisation, has pre-booked 500 units for deployment across schools.

While early use cases centre around education, the state envisions broad applicability across public and private sectors.

“The potential and opportunities are multiple,” Bachegowda explained. “We can deploy KEOs in hospitals, pharmacies, police stations, government offices, SMEs, startups and homes. We’ve built a purpose-designed device for every application.”

When asked if the government is planning to replace the existing computers in the government departments with KEO, Kharge said the use case in the government is currently in the education sector.

He added that once KEO is competent there, it will see heavy  deployments across the departments.

On whether the government has acknowledged or made contributions to the open source community maintaining these tools, Kharge said that they have not reached out.

“They don’t know yet. Once they know, they will reach out,” he said.

Kharge said that over the past year, the government closely examined earlier public-technology efforts like the Aakash tablet and the Simputer, projects that were ambitious but ultimately stumbled due to execution gaps, quality issues and the lack of a supporting ecosystem. He said that the success of KEO will depend entirely on how well we design the blueprint and avoid those pitfalls.

“We are determined not to repeat the same mistakes,” Kharge said.

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