Microchip to invest $300 million to expand India operations

“The investment will be in buildings and infrastructure, equipment and labs, and people. We have estimates of what we want to do and where,” said Ganesh Moorthy, President and CEO of Microchip.

The company’s investments are focused on additional improvements to its Bengaluru and Chennai facilities and the new research and development centre in Hyderabad that the company inaugurated in a ceremony on Monday.

It will also focus on expanding and enhancing its engineering labs, accelerating hiring, and sponsoring technical consortia, supporting academic institutions and programmes. There are approximately 2,500 Microchip employees in India involved in semiconductor design and development, sales and support, IT infrastructure and application engineering operations.

Historically, the headcount has grown 10% to 15% every year in India.

The company has 2,000 customers and develops solutions for industrial, automotive, data centre, aerospace, defence, communications, and consumer industries. The Indian space programme is one of its customers, the company said.

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“As far as manufacturing semiconductors in India is concerned, there is a lot of interest, and a lot of people are looking at it. There is a possibility for some of that investment to turn into capabilities that companies like Microchip could use. At the moment, it’s a little early in that cycle,” Moorthy said.On the use of artificial intelligence in Microchip’s products, he said, “We have solutions across different product lines that go into cloud computing. A lot of our data centre work goes into AI servers. Solutions from Microchip also go into edge computing like in a factory or hospital. AI is also being used at the end point where data is being generated and intelligence can be created using that data. Whether it is in the cloud, edge or the endpoint, our products fit from an AI standpoint.”

India Electronics and Semiconductor Association (IESA) and Counterpoint Research recently reported that India’s semiconductor market is expected to reach $64 billion USD by 2026, which is nearly triple its 2019 size of $22.7 billion.

The Semiconductor Industry Association wrote in its February 2023 India Semiconductor Sector white paper that the country now accounts for 20 percent of the total global design workforce.