Will make market-driven investments in India as country continues to grow: Intel’s Steve Long

December 14 is an important day for US chipmaker Intel as it gears itself for the launch of the much anticipated Meteor Lake (codename for Intel Ultra Core processor) chip. Announced at the Intel Innovation 2023,  it is Intel’s first integrated neural processing unit (NPU) for power-efficient AI acceleration and local inference on the personal computer. 

Ahead of this launch, the senior executives from Intel visited India for the Intel ConnectION event held in Bangalore, focused on the theme of ‘Bringing AI Everywhere’. Against this backdrop, TechCircle spoke to Steve Long, Corporate Vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) and Santhosh Vishwanathan, managing director, Intel India on a range of topics including – Intel’s opportunity in India, heating up chip market, and the intriguing term ‘Siliconomy’ coined by Intel.

Intel India is the largest R&D site of the chipmaker outside of the US. It employs about 14,000 people in the country and has invested about $9 billion over the years. Speaking about India as a market, Long said, “One of the advantages of being in India is that we can go deeper into the actual engineering work. We do some of that leading-edge work, and then we have teams that can partner and sell across the world. So there is a lot of interesting software work that Intel has, and we have big aspirations to scale and we see some of the India's global system integrators as a major way to scale.”

He said that Intel is not looking at manufacturing in India in the near term. Long emphasises that for a semiconductor industry to progress in a region, especially from a manufacturing perspective, four factors are important – ease of doing business, predictability, transparency, and consistent policy. “It takes years for an ecosystem to develop. With the exception of actual manufacturing, Intel in India is doing all the pieces of work as what is done globally, which includes research and development, design, validation, and testing. It will take some time for the ecosystem to mature, and if it does there are more things Intel can and will do in India.” Speaking further, Long said Intel will make market-driven investments as India continues to grow.

Intel, however, partners with local original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and original device manufacturers (ODMs). “Intel wants to be part of the Make in India wave. We are working across different sets of OEMs and ODMs, and leveraging local engineering talent to support the customers. It is a moment when India can be a prominent player in the manufacturing field,’ said Vishwanathan.

To be sure, data from VCCEdge, a sister initiative of TechCircle has shown that even as Intel suffers from declining PC sales, mounting competition from peers, and lowering IT spending, its India business has managed to buck this trend of shrinking revenue. Between FY17-20, for four straight years Intel India clocked 20% plus growth in the country, including an over 50% jump in FY18. The firm did decelerate to 12% growth in FY21 but again broke the long-term trend to quickly bounce into a nearly 30% growth in FY22, followed by 25% rise in the year ended March 2023. 

Moving from manufacturing in India to developing chips for artificial intelligence technology, Long spoke about heating up chip market. In the last few months, companies like Microsoft are developing their own custom chips. “In the last few years, AI has accelerated very quickly. So, of course, when things accelerate, people are going to come at it from different angles. There is an inherent fear of being stuck in the proprietary ecosystem,” said Long.

When asked about how Intel plans to hold ground amid intensifying competition, Long said, “With integrated device manufacturing as a business model, we have factories that can cater to specific customer needs. If any of these firms want to use some components that we use in our own products and integrate them in their designed systems, they may do so. We have advanced packaging technology that can facilitate this.”

Pat Gelsinger, the chief executive officer of Intel, introduced a new term – Siliconomy – at the 2023 Intel Innovation event. It denotes a new era where semiconductors are the foundational element for the modern economy. Long said that Intel has two responsibilities in this Siliconomy.

“First is the pursuit of Moore’s Law and second is optimising our products for new AI workloads – from client to data center and everywhere in between. We want to make the ecosystem safer by creating a balanced and resilient supply chain. Intel is one of the only three companies in the world that can compete in the leading-edge advanced process manufacturing for semiconductors. We have a big responsibility and we are putting money where our mouth is, in terms of capex.”