India can play a key role in building hardy supply chain, says Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon
India can play a key role in building a resilient global electronics supply chain, said Cristiano Amon, chief executive of US chip giant Qualcomm Inc. In an interview with ET's Romit Guha and Himanshi Lohchab, Amon said the country has an opportunity to create large companies that serve both the domestic and global markets in areas such as semiconductor packaging and manufacturing. Edited excerpts:
What are the opportunities for Qualcomm in India?
There's an incredible opportunity with the transition to 5G. But it's not only 5G, but also the incredible opportunity that is developing with Gen AI and the opportunity to do Gen AI at the edge, not only at data centres, but across many different industries.
What's Qualcomm's investment plan for India?
India is our largest R&D site outside San Diego. We have a presence in a number of sites — from Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai and Noida. The majority of our chips are designed in India, both hardware and software. With the world looking for alternatives to make the overall electronic supply chain more resilient, we see that India has an important role to play, an opportunity to create over time, very large Indian companies serving not only the Indian market, but also global, whether it's smartphone industrial modules, whether it's semiconductor packaging, and eventually semiconductor manufacturing.
Have you tied up with the Tatas and/or any other partner for the chip ecosystem?
We're the largest fabless company in the world. And if you're going to build the semiconductor
