‘India, UK to target semiconductors, AI in new advanced tech pact’

livemint.com:

. The agreement will foster collaboration on semiconductors, high performance computing and artificial intelligence, among other key technologies. Freeman indicated that British investments in the Indian semiconductor ecosystem could be seen in the next year or two.

This comes on the heels of British firm SRAM & MRAM Technologies announcing a ₹30,000 crore investment in India’s semiconductor ecosystem. Freeman said differences over data localisation in trade talks are “perfectly resolvable." Can you tell us about the high technology partnership? We’ve set out a major commitment in the UK to shift, after Brexit, from being a service economy to being more of a science, research and innovation economy. We’ve made a 30% increase in our R&D budgets so our total budget for the next three years is 52 billion pounds.

And part of our approach is much deeper collaborations with big global partners, and that’s why I’m here in India. We’ve agreed a framework with the Indian government. The two prime ministers are meeting in the autumn later this year and science and technology minister Jitendra Singh and I met in London in March and we’ve signed an MOU, which empowers minister Singh on behalf of the Indian government to negotiate with me to discuss the shape of the collaboration.

We’ve agreed on three pillars and this would be long term over 5-10 years. Pillar one is science, research and technology. Pillar two deals with commercialization, industry.

innovation, investment. Pillar three is about government, regulation, diplomacy and skills -- the idea is that we’ll have a leadership council, chaired by the two ministers. And then pillar one will be co-chaired by leading Indian and UK scientists.