The American chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced on Friday that it will spend $400 million in India over the following five years and that Bengaluru will become the site of its largest design facility.
On Friday, the annual semiconductor conference in Gujarat, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, began. AMD’s Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster made the news. Young Liu, chairman of Foxconn, and Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of Micron, are among the other speakers at the main event.
The Modi government has been pursuing investments into India’s developing chip sector despite being a latecomer in order to demonstrate its credentials as a chipmaking centre.
By the end of this year, AMD claims to have opened a new campus for its design centre in Bengaluru, and during the next five years, it plans to have added 3,000 additional engineering positions.
“Our India teams will continue to play a crucial role in providing the high-performance and adaptable solutions that support AMD customers worldwide,” said Papermaster.
With the addition of the 500,000 square foot (55,555 square yards) facility, AMD will have 10 offices in India. More than 6,500 people work for it currently in the nation.
AMD processors are utilised in a wide variety of applications, including personal PCs and data centres. The Santa Clara, California-based company is also developing an AI processor that will compete with industry leader Nvidia Corp.
Unlike its leading rival Intel, AMD contracts with outside producers like Taiwan’s TSMC to produce the chips it designs.
TSMC and Samsung are two of the select few chipmakers in the world to have mastered cutting-edge chipmaking, a technique that many countries are now fighting for to prevent supply chain shocks like those experienced during the epidemic.
A $10 billion incentive scheme for the semiconductor industry was presented by India in 2021, but the plan has failed because no company has been able to secure approval for building a fabrication factory, the keystone of Modi’s objectives.
Other investments in India include an engineering centre planned to be built in Gujarat for $825 million by chipmaker Micron and a multi-year $400 million proposal to establish one by American chip equipment maker Applied Materials in June.
