US 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 centre 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 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 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.
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 PM
Modi's ambitions.
Other investments in India include a multi-year $400 million
plan by US chip equipment maker Applied Materials in June to set up an engineering
center, and chipmaker Micron's $825 million investment in a semiconductor
testing and packaging unit in Gujarat. © Reuters
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