Company Outsider | Why India’s ₹1.6-trillion semiconductor bet looks more Intel than Nvidia

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Company Outsider is a weekly newsletter by Sundeep Khanna. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your email inbox. Erstwhile semiconductor giant Intel has shed 23% of its global workforce over the past two years.

That’s nearly 30,000 people laid off despite receiving billions in government subsidies to boost domestic manufacturing. When CEO Lip-Bu Tan admitted that his company is "not in the top 10 semiconductor companies" by valuation, he was acknowledging what the market already knows: the company that once defined the industry now holds less than 1% of the discrete GPU market, which is the very architecture powering the AI revolution, compared to Nvidia's 92%. The brutal lesson? Throwing money at semiconductors cannot solve what is fundamentally a technology and execution problem.

For India, currently committing over ₹1.6 trillion to its semiconductor mission, Intel's downfall offers uncomfortable truths. Intel's decline becomes particularly instructive when contrasted with Nvidia's rise. Nvidia didn't stumble into AI chip dominance; it built toward it for over a decade before the generative AI boom.

While Intel maximized quarterly profits from its CPU monopoly, Nvidia took a massive risk by investing in specialized software and chips that seemed like a niche side project at the time, but eventually became the foundation for the AI revolution. Its founder, Jensen Huang, famously called it a “zero-billion-dollar opportunity", since there was no telling when its commercial value would be realized. By the time ChatGPT created explosive demand for AI training chips in late 2022, Nvidia had spent 15 years developing exactly the technology the market needed.