By Munsif Vengattil
GANDHINAGAR, India (Reuters) – U.S. chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices said on Friday it will invest around $400 million in India over the next five years and will build its largest design center in the tech hub of Bengaluru.
AMD’s announcement was made by its Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster at an annual semiconductor conference that started Friday in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s home state of Gujarat. Other speakers at the flagship event include Foxconn Chairman Young Liu and Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra.
Despite being a late entrant, the Modi government has been courting investments into India’s nascent chip sector to establish its credentials as a chipmaking hub.
AMD said it will open its new design centre campus in Bengaluru by end of this year and create 3,000 new engineering roles within five years.
“Our India teams will continue to play a pivotal role in delivering the high-performance and adaptive solutions that support AMD customers worldwide,” Papermaster said.
The new 500,000-square-foot (55,555 square yards) campus will increase AMD’s office footprint in India to 10 locations. It already has more than 6,500 employees in the country.
From personal computers to data centers, AMD chips are used in a wide range of devices. The Santa Clara, California-based firm is also working on an artificial intelligence chip that will take on market leader Nvidia Corp.
Unlike its top rival Intel, AMD outsources production of chips it designs to third-party manufacturers like Taiwan’s TSMC.
TSMC and the South Korea’s Samsung are among the elite few chipmakers globally to have mastered cutting-edge chipmaking, a technology many nations are now vying for to avoid supply chain shocks, such as faced during the pandemic.
India in 2021 unveiled a $10 billion incentive programme for the chip sector, but the plan has floundered as no company has so far managed to get clearance for setting up a fabrication plant, the centerpiece to Modi’s ambitions.
Other investments in India include a multi-year $400 million plan by U.S. chip equipment maker Applied Materials in June to set up an engineering center, and chipmaker Micron’ $825 million investment in a semiconductor testing and packaging unit in Gujarat.
(Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Gandhinagar, Gujarat; Editing by Aditya Kalra and Sonali Paul)
