Intel expands in India, unveils new design and engineering centre

While unveiling chip giant Intel's new facility in India, Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that by 2025, India's digital economy should reach $1 trillion

Intel, the world’s largest maker of computer processors, is expanding its design and engineering footprint in the country.

Intel India on Friday unveiled a centre with 453,000 square feet spread over two towers, which can accommodate 2,000 employees. It will help advance cutting-edge design and engineering work in clients, data centres, graphics, artificial intelligence, automotive segments and IoT (Internet of Things), where devices communicate with each other intelligently.

“I am walking into the Intel campus after many years,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union minister of state for electronics and information technology, who on Friday visited Intel’s Bengaluru campus to unveil the new state-of-the-art facility.

Chandrasekhar was hand-picked by Vinod Dham, father of the Pentium chip, to work at Intel as a senior design engineer and a CPU architect during 1986-91 in Silicon Valley in the US. He later returned to India to pursue entrepreneurship.

“Those years when we were building Intel, we lived and worked much more frugally. We had (dark) grey carpets and horrible orange cubicles and some workstations. But we had the ‘can do’ spirit of Intel,” said Chandrasekhar, who did master’s in computer science at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago.

The centre features facilities including IoT-based systems like desk-booking platforms, an interactive kiosk for occupancy status and floor layouts, and real-time room occupancy indicators. One floor of 70,000 square feet is dedicated to high-tech R&D labs for silicon design and validation purposes. The facility sports a host of employee amenities such as over 50 video-enabled conference rooms, phone booths, collaboration spaces, breakout zones, and lounge areas.

Intel has the largest design and engineering operations outside the US, with facilities in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. It has nine such design and engineering centres in India, which include eight in Bengaluru and one in Hyderabad. The Santa Clara, California-based company said it had invested over $8 billion in India to date and continued to expand its R&D and innovation footprint in the country. Its workforce in India has increased to about 14,000.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently said India’s consumption of semiconductors was expected to cross $80 billion by 2026 and $110 billion by 2030. Modi urged the industry to make India a global hub for semiconductors.

Nivruti Rai, country head of Intel India and vice-president of Intel Foundry Services, said: “We have been working very closely with the government. We were showcasing some of the innovations that Intel is driving in India.”

“There are 650,000 villages in the country. We talk about 3G, 4G and 5G in the cities, but rural villages are unconnected. So, we are trying to build solutions where the villages can get connectivity in a manner which is affordable and scalable.”

Many countries are also looking at autonomous driving. But Rai said Intel India was working on collision avoidance systems for the automotive industry.

“We are building connectivity solutions and driver-assist systems and customizing it for India use cases.”