AMD Confident About Increasing Market Share In India The semiconductor company is positive about the business environment in India on the back of growing investments in data centers and AI, Cloud repatriation, as well as technology refresh taking place across companies on both server side and client devices

"In India, we were all very skeptical about how the semiconductors industry would take off. We were crawling, walking and running. We thought, let's take baby steps and not commit to something big," said Jaya Jagadish. That's how Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), a global semiconductor company, commenced its journey in India. From there to having inaugurated its largest global design center – the AMD Technostar R&D campus in Bengaluru – marking a milestone in the company's commitment to expand research, development, and engineering operations in India, the future looks promising.

"We had a handful of engineers when we started and now we are looking at 7,000-plus," Jagadish said, the country head and senior vice president at AMD India. Currently, as part of its $400 million investment in India, the company aims to add about 3,000 more engineers to its workforce over the next five years across various disciplines. "Soon, we are looking at hypergrowth situations in the next few years where we will be crossing the 10,000 mark," she added. Around 25 percent of AMD's global workforce is located in India and they support the development of AMD leadership products for data center, gaming, PC and embedded customers.

In order to realize its goal of becoming a significant player in the global semiconductor value chain, India needs to encourage the cultivation of homegrown talents. To meet the surge in talent demand, focus should be on building capacity in chip designing and manufacturing.

Emphasizing on the importance of talent, Jagadish said that during the initial days of hiring engineers in India, she faced a lot of challenges. "I was not able to roll out a single offer. And that's when we decided to take a slightly different approach, rather than anticipating and relying on external talent, we decided to hire smart engineers with an aptitude for learning and trained them in-house." This highlights the role of academia and need for industry collaborations for the semiconductor talent pool.

To meet its talent needs, India has currently forged partnerships with over 104 universities to lay the foundation for talent development in semiconductor technology.

What makes Jaya Jagadish confident about the Indian semiconductor ecosystem? "We already have a lot of investments into manufacturing. As we have more success in this, the sector will have a lot more investors. The talent pool availability in India is its advantage, we are looking at supplying to the world's needs from India. The conduciveness or ease of doing business with the government is aiding this ecosystem," she explained.

To give an overview, AMD has five broad business categories in India. It has a portfolio of central processing unit (CPUs), graphics processing unit (GPUs), field-programmable gate array (FPGAs), adaptive system-on-chip and deep software expertise to enable leadership computing platforms for Cloud, edge, and end-devices. India is an important market for AMD across these categories, "The first half of 2024 has been positive for the company with good growth in market share, new customer acquisition across industry verticals, increased share with OEMs, and expansion of our partner base across metros and non-metros," said Vinay Sinha, MD, sales, AMD India.

Business expansion in India

AMD sees tremendous potential for growth across different sectors including telecom, banking, financial services, insurance, government, wired and wireless communications, automotive, industrial, aerospace and healthcare.

India offers opportunities for AMD to gain market share and mindshare among its customers. "We are positive about the business environment in India on the back of growing investments in data centers and AI, Cloud repatriation, as well as technology refresh taking place across companies on both server side and client devices," Sinha said.

As India becomes more digitized, enterprises need robust and secure data centers to store trillion bytes of data being generated each day. Government of India's data localization policy has also moved many companies to ramp up their data center capacities within the country. In this context, AMD sees growth opportunities in data heavy sectors.

"As India gets ready for the 6G network, we believe that the telecom sector will be one of the key areas that will adopt high-performance computing and adaptive system-on-chips over the next 2-3 years. They will have to put in place the data processing infrastructure that will allow faster delivery of Internet content, and seamless roll out of a host of next gen applications. We are tapping these opportunities by working very closely with our ecosystem partners to highlight the value proposition of AMD technologies to meet their end-to-end needs," Sinha explained.

Roadmap ahead

Sharing insights into the development of AMD Technostar R&D campus, Jaya said that the company is looking at the completion of the second phase which will be inaugurated.

What more can be expected? AMD will be hiring a lot of AI-basd engineers and there will be growth across other areas as well. "We need our IPs to be compatible with the demands of the industry and hence will come up with next generation IPs. AMD is also meeting compute challenges for the CPUs and is working on the system-on-chips," Jaya explained.

AMD is well positioned to tap the growing demand for GPUs in data centers to process artificial intelligence (AI) and other data-intensive workloads. "We are leveraging the expansion of local data centers by major players in India. Our main product to tap this opportunity is the AMD Instinct MI300 series of accelerators. These are some of the world's most advanced accelerators for generative AI. You will see us collaborating with leading public and private sector players to advance and make the limitless potential of AI possible in India," Sinha added.

The data explosion in India fueled by digitization initiatives from the government, the increasing penetration of Internet connectivity with 5G, as well as adoption of emerging digital technologies like AI, big data and machine learning (ML) by enterprises makes India an important growth market for AMD.