VVDN to manufacture Intel-based products in India

Gurugram-based engineering and contract manufacturing firm, VVDN Technologies, has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with US chipmaker Intel to manufacture enterprise grade products for companies in India. While Intel will offer its chips and reference designs, VVDN will develop and build a range of products that include 5G radios and connected internet of things (IoT) sensors for the telecom sector, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)-based connected surveillance cameras, and more.

According to a statement by Intel, the manufacturing MoU with VVDN will cater to data centers and telecom infrastructure, and would be used by enterprises for deployment of 5G connectivity, cloud services and other sectors.

Steve Long, corporate vice-president and general manager, Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) at Intel, said that the partnership with VVDN is in line with the government of India’s Make in India initiative. Puneet Agarwal, chief executive of VVDN, said that the company will look to locally source components from the domestic supply chain, to build products for the telecom and enterprise technology sectors.

VVDN Technologies is also manufacturing servers for domestic deployment in data centers. On July 28, the company signed a contract with the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), a research and development organization under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity) to manufacture Rudra — India’s first indigenously designed high performance computing servers.

In a statement, VVDN said that the Rudra servers are tipped to be used in C-DAC’s ‘Param’ series of supercomputers — India’s most powerful supercomputers at the moment.

To be sure, chipmakers are increasingly looking at India to develop products domestically — in anticipation of a higher volume of demand with the advent of 5G services in India, and the need for enterprises to upgrade.

Sachin Kalantri, senior director of product marketing at Qualcomm India, told Mint at the sidelines of the recently concluded India Mobile Congress 2022 that the San Diego-based chipmaker is bringing its reference designs and chips for the enterprise sector to Indian companies for the first time commercially.

“With these designs, companies can build commercial automotive, manufacturing, drone and other deployments across sectors, which represents a major market for Qualcomm in India,” he said.

Intel’s latest partnership with VVDN is in line with this rise in demand, which has also seen global contract manufacturers such as Foxconn, Wistron Corp and Pegatron set-up facilities in India under the union government’s production-linked incentive schemes.