AMD, a leading semiconductor company with a robust presence in India, recognizes data centers and the telecom sector as key opportunities for growth. In a conversation with Digitimes Asia, Vinay Sinha, MD of Sales at AMD India, highlighted the surge in data driven by government digitization, the rise of 5G, and the uptake of technologies like AI, Big Data, and ML in businesses, emphasizing India's significance as a growth market for AMD.
"One of the biggest opportunities for us is in the data center space," Sinha said. "As this country of 1.4 billion becomes more digitized, enterprises need robust and secure data centers to store trillions of bytes of data generated daily in India. The government of India's data localization policy has also moved many companies to ramp up their data center capacities within India. India is the second largest data center market in Asia-Pacific after China. In this context, we see growth opportunities for AMD in data-heavy sectors, including banking, financial services, insurance, telecom, manufacturing, government, information technology-enabled services, etc."
As for telecom, AMD believes that as India prepares for the 6G network, the sector will be a principal adopter of high-performance server CPUs within the next two to three 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," Sinha said. "We are tapping these opportunities by working very closely with our ecosystem partners to highlight the value proposition of our EPYC processors in 'Modern Data centers'."
Investments and partnerships
At Semicon India 2023, AMD committed $400 million to India for five years, aiming to expand its workforce from 7,000 to 10,000 by 2028 and to hire 3,000 engineers. It's also launching a major design center in Bengaluru, with its first phase, the AMD Technostar Campus R&D Center, inaugurated on November 28.
Sinha pointed out that it is encouraging to see the measures taken by India's government to build the semiconductor value chain in the country.
"I am glad that in addition to the manufacturing focus, the government's policies emphasize building the talent ecosystem," Sinha said. "We believe this will be foundational to India's success as an important player in the semiconductor value chain."
AMD India Country Head Jaya Jagadish led a talent committee established under the India Semiconductor Mission to recommend how India can become a hub for global semiconductor talent. The report shared by the committee made a series of recommendations, including curriculum changes to make engineers industry-ready.
"The All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has already implemented these changes in 300+ engineering colleges and soon will cover all colleges," Sinha said. "Another important outcome of these recommendations is the launch of the B.Tech. in VLSI design course as an engineering degree in India."
AMD's India outlook
The company believes India is on an incredible journey to build its semiconductor and display ecosystem, supported by the government's incentives and programs. AMD plans to grow in India in terms of our workforce and business.
"Concerning market opportunities, India is an important market for AMD products comprised of high-performance CPUs for Servers and PCs, AI accelerators, Gaming GPUs, adaptive SoCs, and FPGAs for embedded solutions," Sinha said. "With this broad portfolio, AMD enables regional partners to build solutions to strengthen and modernize India's enterprise IT infrastructure."
AMD also collaborates across the computing and semiconductor ecosystem in India and around the world with open-source solutions to accelerate both performance and energy efficiency in chips.
"While this is a journey, we have made great progress in building a powerful open software stack called AMD ROCm," Sinha said. "It is a broad set of libraries, runtime compilers, drivers, tools like our debugger and profiler etc. ROCm, in its sixth generation, supports the AI software ecosystem, including open frameworks, models, and tools that any company, including startups, can leverage."
Conclusion
AMD is positioning itself at the heart of India's rapid digitalization, focusing on data centers and the telecom sector in anticipation of the upcoming 6G network. The company's investment and expansion plans, including significantly enhancing its employee base and establishing a major design center, reflect a strong belief in the Indian market's growth potential. Aligning with India's policy environment and leveraging the evolving semiconductor landscape, AMD is set to deepen its footprint in the region.
"The India team is important to AMD's success as they play a role in the design of nearly every AMD chip," Sinha said. "We are also growing our partner ecosystem and customer base to grow market share."
