Referring to a recent roundtable in New York between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and top technology industry CEOs, Vaishnaw said three CEOs had said they had not seen this kind of enthusiasm for any country in the last 35 to 40 years.
He reiterated that the Idaho-based Micron Technology will roll out the first made-in-India memory chips by early 2025. He also gave a status check about the progress of other chip packaging facilities like CG Power’s Sanand facility and Tata Electronics’ Assam ATMP facility.
“The CG Power facility should also come up very fast. The construction work is going on. In Tata’s ATMP facility in Assam, construction work is going on very well,” he said.
About India’s first fabrication unit in Gujarat’s Dholera, Vaishnaw said that the technology agreement between Tata Electronics and Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp was recently signed a few weeks ago.
“What we are seeing is that the ecosystem for about 200 odd players who must come in, their entire initial hesitance, the thoughts they had have all got converted into that this is the next big semiconductor destination. That is something they feel comfortable about,” Vaishnaw said.
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The minister said that the quantum of manufacturing in the country is today worth $120 billion. “We have identified about eight sub-modules where we can have large scale production, and the programme is in the process of being finalised. All the stakeholders are being consulted. That will give the next wave of manufacturing in the country,” he said. “We have laptops coming out of the assembly lines. We have servers shipped out from VVDN factory in Manesar, Google Pixel phones getting manufactured here, and Apple, of course, every new model they are manufacturing here,” Vaishnaw said.
The minister said that companies see talent, consistency of policies, and clarity of thought, which makes India a destination of choice for them.
On a question whether the momentum of US companies pivoting away from China is still strong, he said that the momentum has been consistent and the biggest factor for that is the talent availability in India.
He explained that the talent factor is much bigger than geopolitical issues. “We are also seeing that some of the technologies for which we were dependent upon other countries earlier, for example, UK, within a short time frame of one-and-a-half years, the technology got developed by a team of about 80-90 engineers in Hyderabad,” he said.
“So that kind of pace is available today. We are seeing some of these companies trying to acquire some of the product markets and get the IP and use the talent which is available here and add the manufacturing capabilities,” Vaishnaw said.