Source: Content compiled from economictimes
Nvidia has proposed to jointly develop chips with India as the company looks to tap into the country's strong semiconductor design talent and tap into the growing market, people familiar with the matter said.
GPU chips
The proposal was made by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of the world's second-largest company by market value, during a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the United States earlier this year. Nvidia's valuation has soared as its graphics processing unit (GPU) chips have become an integral part of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom that is driving the tech industry. Ashwini Vaishnaw, India's Minister of Electronics and Information Technology, confirmed the development to The Economic Times of India, "Yes, we are in discussions with Nvidia to develop AI chips; the discussions are at a preliminary stage."
Officials said Nvidia wants to tap India's vast chip design base to develop a chip designed specifically for India. "The government is currently studying the details of the cost, benefits, use cases, etc. of such a jointly developed chip," said one of the officials.
The jointly developed chip can be customized for Indian use cases, such as Kavach, a security system for Indian railways, the person said. In addition, if the government launches the chip under the AI mission, Indian startups, companies and the government can use the chip to support various applications that may emerge, the official added.
Nvidia has not yet responded to queries on the matter.
The Santa Clara, California-based company has surpassed Microsoft and Alphabet in market value in a short period of time. Its current market value of $3.39 trillion is just below Apple, the world's most valuable company, at $3.57 trillion.
Huang will visit India later this week, which is his annual trip to the country. Last September, Huang met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to India, and the two sides discussed India's potential in the field of artificial intelligence. "Modi said to me, Jason, India should not export flour to import bread," Huang said, recalling the meeting. "That makes sense. Why export raw materials to import value-added products? Why export India's data so you can import AI?"
In the case of a jointly developed chip, the core chip would be designed by Nvidia's chip design partners such as Arm or AMD, while the top 10-20% that is being customized could be designed by India's state-owned Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) or private chip design companies, officials said. Nvidia's proposal stems from the need to effectively tap into India's large pool of chip designers, they said.
"There are only two countries in the world that can do this (jointly develop chips with Nvidia), either us or Germany. "India is the first choice because it has a lot of chip design talent, which other countries don't have," the official said.
Parv Sharma, senior analyst at technology market research firm Counterpoint Research, said India offers huge opportunities for growth in data centers and artificial intelligence applications. "Nvidia is a key enabler of artificial intelligence, cloud computing and data centers, and has partnered with Reliance Industries and Tata Group to develop AI infrastructure. Having a jointly developed chip will be a big win as it will enable the silicon to be used for custom use cases in India."
Other voices
Sharma said growing in India means increasing design-related intellectual property (IP), cost-effective silicon, innovation to support AI startups, and supply chain risk management. "Overall, this will be a key value-add for India's semiconductor mission because this will be the first cloud-based chip designed in India," he said.
According to a recent Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study, 19% of the world's chip designers are based in India. Most of them have very advanced skills and are employed in the back office of the world's top chip design companies, which manufacture chips elsewhere and then import them to India for use in various electronic products.
Experts have been calling on the Indian government to create an end-to-end ecosystem that includes indigenous chip design and manufacturing to address this problem.
"India has some of the greatest computer scientists in the world. This is a great opportunity. AI is also an emerging industry, a very important emerging manufacturing industry," Huang said after meeting Prime Minister Modi in the United States earlier this year. "I look forward to working very deeply with India to achieve this. We have a lot of partnerships with India."
He said AI has democratized computing, adding: "This is an opportunity for India. You have to seize the opportunity."
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