Semiconductor giant Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang has proposed to develop a chip jointly with India as the world’s second most valuable company seeks to utilise India’s semiconductor design talent, according to an Economic Times report.
The proposal came about when Prime Minister Narendra Modi met Huang in the US earlier this year, according to the report. Huang is at India currently for the Nvidia AI summit.
The report also cited Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting and Electronics & IT, as confirming the matter. He added that discussions are at a preliminary stage currently.
Nvidia would also be developing an India specific chip with the government currently thrashing out details like costing, benefits, and uses, the report cited unnamed official sources as saying.
This is because there are only two countries in the world which can co-develop a chip with Nvidia; India and Germany, the report cited the officials as saying. A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study also found that 19% of the world’s chip designers are based in India.
The core chip may be designed by Nvidia’s chip design partners such as Arm or AMD while the top 10-20% layer can be designed by the government-owned Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) or by a private Indian chip design company, according to the report.
An example of a use case would be for the Indian Railways’ security system, Kavach, apart from supporting various apps which may come out if the government makes it available under the AI mission.
Nvidia’s market cap zoomed past Microsoft and Alphabet, standing at $3.39 trillion, just marginally behind Apple’s $3.57 trillion.
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