Why AMD chose India to set up its largest global design centre

AMD CTO Mark Papermaster said AI is changing the way they design chips as well as what they put in every one of their products.

India has an "incredible" talent pool and it will only further grow in the future with the government's focus on developing workforce for semiconductors and other high tech areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) chief technology officer (CTO) Mark Papermaster told Moneycontrol in an interview.

On November 28, AMD unveiled its largest global design centre in Bengaluru that spans an area of 500,000 square feet and will house around 3,000 engineers dedicated to the design and development of semiconductor technology, including 3D stacking, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, among other areas.

The centre is part of the company's $400 million investment plan over the next five years to expand its research, development, and engineering operations in India.

Papermaster said about 25 percent of this investment was used to build the initial phase of the campus, known as AMD Technostar, that was inaugurated on November 28. The second phase of the campus is expected to be operational by the third quarter of next year.

The investment has also been used to hire people for this facility. AMD has previously stated plans to hire around 3,000 engineers by the end of 2028.

Papermaster said the opening of this facility comes at a time when the tech industry is at an inflection point.

"With the advent of machine learning and AI applications across every walk of life and business that we perform, we're going to be using technology even more pervasively to speed up our productivity as we work together and it needs much more capable, and power efficient chip technology to achieve our aspirations in these areas," he said.

During his keynote address at the inauguration ceremony, Papermaster said he expects this facility to become a hub of collaboration internally with the company's employees but also with its customers and partners.

"This is an opportunity for us to build even stronger partnerships with local academic institutions, research agencies, other technology companies in the area, as well as the government of India. These partnerships aim to foster the development of next generation technology that will power both local and global markets" he said.

In a virtual address at the ceremony, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the campus represents the "significant contributions" of the AMD India team over many years as they "helped us push the envelope in high performance and adaptive computing and create a broad portfolio of leadership products that are helping solve the world's most important challenges."

The AMD India Technostar R&D campus will also play an increasingly important role in the design of the semiconductor design firm's future products, she said.

Also Read: Microsoft is supporting AMD’s expansion into AI chips

Why India?

Papermaster told Moneycontrol that they chose the India market to set up its largest design facility because the local India team has demonstrated a capability to hire great talent and to grow its leadership.

"When you can hire the right talent and grow the leadership commensurately, what that leads to is great products, because the teams have expanded the scope of what they're doing, they've grown in experience and so their impact has gone up and they've proven the capabilities," he said.

The Santa Clara-headquartered firm, which started operations in India with a handful of employees in 2001, has since expanded its workforce to over 7,000 employees, constituting 25 percent of AMD's global workforce. With the new Bengaluru facility, AMD has expanded its office footprint to 10 locations across India, including Delhi, Gurugram, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.

Last year's acquisitions of Xilinx and Pensando, both of which had major operations in India, also resulted in the company growing its employee base in the country.

Papermaster said that the Indian team plays a role in each and every product that they develop. "In some cases, a majority of the work might be done here while in some cases, it might be a more supporting role," he said.

"Where we're going to be leaning in on the growth here will be particularly in the areas of AI and high performance computing," he said.

How is AI changing chip design

Papermaster said that AI is also changing the way they design chips as well as what they put in every one of their products.

In terms of designing chips, AMD currently has over 100 projects that are looking at the best ways to apply AI across many aspects of the development process.

"When you think about these most complex chip designs, there are over 100 billion transistors in a single design, so how to best optimise those, how to align these transistors so that they give you the most performance, yet burn the least amount of energy. So, we are already applying AI across the design processes and test processes as well as using AI with our manufacturing partners," he said.

The products themselves are also AI-enabled. For instance, AMD added an AI accelerator to the Ryzen 7000 series that they announced earlier this year and the firm is working closely with Microsoft on applications that leverage these capabilities.

Next week, AMD is also unveiling its highest performance AI chip - the Instinct MI300 data center GPU (graphics processing units) accelerator family - which Papermaster believes will be a leader in AI capabilities.

This product is also expected to help AMD take on the current market leader Nvidia.

"Our competition has dominated in the highest performing AI chips. In fact, they have not had any competition in the industry. But with the AMD Instinct MI300, we are bringing competition directly to this market," Papermaster said.