Nvidia Offers to Jointly Develop New Customized Chip for India

American tech giant Nvidia has recently come up with a proposal to jointly develop a chip with India as reported by the Economic Times.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of the Santa Clara, California-based company brought this proposal to the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi when the two met in the US earlier this year. At $3.39 trillion, the software and fabless company is now only marginally behind the $3.57 trillion of Apple, the world’s most-valued company.

Nvidia's plans

According to ET’s report, Nvidia wants to use India's huge chip design base and build an India-specific chip. “The government is currently thrashing out the details such as costing, benefits, use cases of such a co-developed chip,” one of the officials has commented.

The co-developed chip could be customized for India, for example, the Indian Railways’ security system, etc. Moreover, the government, Indian startups, and companies can utilize the chip to support various apps if the government makes it available under the AI mission, the official added.

The union minister for electronics and IT, Ashwini Vaishnaw has confirmed the development saying, “Yes, we are discussing with Nvidia the development of an AI chip; discussions are at a preliminary stage.”

Huang to visit India for finalization

Huang is on his annual trip and visiting India later this week. During his visit to the country last year, Huang met PM Modi and they discussed India’s potential in the area of artificial intelligence (AI).

“He (Modi) said to me, Jensen, India should not export flour to import bread. This makes perfect sense. Why export the raw material to import the value add? Why export the data of India, so that you can import AI?” the Nvidia CEO said recalling the conversation. 

Officials have informed that in the case of a co-developed chip, the core chip will be designed by Nvidia’s chip design partners such as Arm or AMD. Meanwhile, the top 10-20% customized layer can be designed by the government-owned Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) or perhaps an Indian private chip design company. They said Nvidia has made the proposal to effectively utilize a large number of chip designers in this country.