AMD announces to invest $400 million in India over next five years

US chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has announced that they will be investing $400 million in India over the next five years.

AMD’s Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster made the announcement on Friday (July 28) in the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during an annual semiconductor conference in the PM’s home state Gujarat.

Other speakers at the marquee event include Foxconn Chairman Young Liu and Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra.

AMD is expected to open its new design centre campus in southern Bengaluru city—which is known as the Silicon Valley of India— by the end of this year and will serve as the company’s largest design centre.

AMD said that it would generate about 3,000 new engineering roles within five years.

“Our India teams will continue to play a pivotal role in delivering the high-performance and adaptive solutions that support AMD customers worldwide,” Papermaster said.

The California-based firm has been operating in India since 2001 when it opened its first site in the capital New Delhi city.

New campus coming up in Bengaluru

Now, the company has more than 6500 employees in India. And with this new 500,000-square-foot Bengaluru campus, AMD will increase its office footprint in 10 locations across these cities—Bangaluru, Delhi, Gurugram, Hyderabad and Mumbai.

The new AMD campus is expected to open before the end of 2023 and will feature extensive lab space, state-of-the-art collaboration tools and seating configurations designed to foster teamwork.

The investment is supported by the various policy initiatives of the Government of India focused on the semiconductor industry.

For years, India has been trying hard to improve its nascent chip-making industry. In 2021, the Narendra Modi-led government unveiled a $10 billion incentive programme for the chip sector, but the plan has hit few roadblocks as no company has managed to set a up a fabrication plant.

Unlike its top rival Intel, AMD outsources production of chips it designs to third-party manufacturers like Taiwan’s TSMC, reports Reuters news agency.

TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung are among the elite few chipmakers globally to have mastered cutting-edge chipmaking, a technology many nations are now vying for to avoid supply chain shocks, such as those faced during the pandemic.