Semicon India 2023: AMD to invest $400 million in five years

U.S. chipmaker AMD will invest around $400 million in India in the next five years. The planned investment will include AMD's new campus in Bengaluru which will serve as AMD's largest R&D facility in the world.

"Our investment will build over two decades of growth and successful presence in India. We started in India in 2001, 22 years ago when we had only a handful of employees. Today, we have over 6,500 employees and additional 3,000 partners and contractors. We expect approximately 3000 additional engineers in India by 2028," says AMD chief technology officer Mark Papermaster at the Semicon India 2023 event.

Through these investments, AMD will further expand its R&D capabilities in India to be able to drive its semiconductor design innovation and support the government's Semiconductor Mission, says Papermaster.

"The AMD India team plays a role in nearly every AMD product that we produce. We have diversified portfolio across CPU, server, data centres, gaming graphics, PC, adaptive computing and embedded devices. This investment will allow us to expand our portfolio and capabilities," he says.

As we bring artificial intelligence (AI) processing capabilities broadly across products, AMD's India teams will be pivotal in advancing AI machine learning and both hardware and software capabilities, says the company's CTO.

Speaking at the conclave, Micron president and CEO Sanjay Mehrotra says the chipmaker's new assembly and test facility in Gujarat's Sanand Industrial Park will be the first for India. "We estimate that our project in Gujarat will create nearly 5,000 direct jobs plus an additional 15,000 jobs in the community over the coming years," Mehrotra says.

"The memory products we develop are central to every modern computing device. As computing becomes more pervasive and intertwined in all aspects of our daily lives, many more memory storage packages will be required and our India facility will help us meet the growing demand," he says. "We are hopeful that this investment will help catalyse other investments in the sector, strengthen indigenous manufacturing capability, encourage innovation and support job creation."

Vedanta's new partner

According to Vedanta chairman Anil Agarwal, international experts went to all the states and finally chose Gujarat, saying the western state is the right place for creating Silicon Valley of India. "Vedanta is fully committed to build semiconductor and display fab. We have gone around the world and signed hundreds of MoUs. For semiconductors, we have already identified a world-class partner for technology and are in the process of tying up with them," says Agarwal.

Two things – huge infrastructure and ecosystem – are required to create a semiconductor hub, says Agarwal. "The kind of response we got in Japan, Korea and the U.S., the ecosystem will be built around Gujarat," he says.

The Semicon India 2023 event is being organised by India Semiconductor Mission in partnership with industry and industry associations.