The proposal was made by Jensen Huang, the founding CEO of the world’s second most valuable company, to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a meeting in the United States earlier this year. Nvidia’s valuation has soared as its graphics processing unit (GPU) chips have become essential to the surge in artificial intelligence (AI) driving the tech industry. Confirming the development, Union Minister for Electronics and IT Ashwini Vaishnau told ET, Discussions are at a preliminary stage. ”
Nvidia hopes to leverage India’s huge chip design base to develop chips specifically for India, people familiar with the matter said. “The government is currently finalizing details such as costs, benefits and use cases for such jointly developed chips,” one of them said.
EtechThe chips jointly developed by the talent hub could be customized for Indian use cases, such as Indian Railways’ Kavach security system, the people said. The chip can also be used by Indian startups, businesses and the government to support various apps that may come up if the government makes it available under the AI mission, the official added. .
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Nvidia did not respond to ET’s inquiries.
The Santa Clara, California-based company quickly surpassed Microsoft and Alphabet in market capitalization. The company is currently valued at $3.39 trillion, just behind Apple’s $3.57 trillion, the world’s most valuable company.
Mr. Huang will visit India later this week on his annual visit to India. During his visit in September last year, Huang met Prime Minister Modi and discussed the opportunities India offers in the world of AI.
“He (Prime Minister Modi) told me that Jensen in India should not export flour to import bread. This makes perfect sense. Why not import value-added? Are we going to export raw materials? Why do we need to export India’s data to import AI?” Huang said, recalling the meeting.
In the case of co-developed chips, the core chips are designed by Nvidia’s chip design partners such as Arm and AMD, and the top 10-20% layer during customization is done by the government-owned Center for India’s Advanced Computing, officials said. C-DAC) or developed by a private chip design company. They said Nvidia’s proposal stems from effectively leveraging India’s large number of chip designers.
“There are only two countries in the world that can do this (co-developing chips with Nvidia), and they are either the United States or Germany.India has a large number of human resources in the chip design field that other countries do not have. It has become the first choice,” the person cited above said.
Parv Sharma, senior analyst at technology market research firm Counterpoint Research, said India has huge opportunities for growth in data centers and AI-based applications. “Nvidia is a leading enabler of AI, cloud and data center and is already collaborating with Reliance Industries and Tata Group on AI infrastructure. Having a co-developed chip will bring silicon to custom use cases in India. It will be a big win because we will be able to use it.”
Sharma said development in India means adding design-related intellectual property (IP), cost-effective silicon, innovation enablement for AI startups and supply chain risk management. “Overall, this will be a significant value addition to the India Semiconductor Mission as it will be the first cloud-based chip to be designed in India,” he said.
According to a recent study by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 19% of the world’s chip designers are based in India. Highly skilled, most of them are employed in the back-office departments of world-class chip design companies, where the chips are manufactured elsewhere and then imported to India for use in various electronic products. .
Experts have called on the Indian government to create an end-to-end ecosystem that encompasses indigenous chip design and manufacturing to resolve this scenario.
“India is home to some of the world’s best computer scientists. This is a great opportunity. AI is also a new industry, and a very important new manufacturing industry,” Huang said after meeting PM Modi in the US earlier this year. There is,” he said. “We look forward to a very deep partnership with India to make that possible.”
He said AI has democratized computing and added, “This is India’s moment. We must seize the opportunity.”
