First, India is now designing its own cutting-edge 2-nanometer (2nm) chips. Second, the country is developing six of its own indigenous large language models (LLMs).
This is a huge step towards technological self-reliance and AI sovereignty.
India's Semiconductor Dream Gets Real
The semiconductor news is a game-changer. Vaishnaw, holding up a palm-sized semiconductor wafer, explained that India has leveled up from designing 5nm and 7nm chips to the 2nm league—the most complex and smallest chips available today.
Here's the breakdown of India's semiconductor push:
Mission Mode: This is all part of the India Semiconductor Mission, which kicked off in December 2021 with a Rs 76,000 crore outlay.
Massive Investment: 10 semiconductor projects, valued at Rs 1.6 lakh crore, have already been approved across six states.
Global Talent Hub: India is already home to 20% of the world's chip design engineers. British firm ARM is notably developing 2nm chips right from its Bengaluru office.
Timeline: The first "Made-in-India" semiconductor chip is officially expected by the end of 2025, with five manufacturing units already under construction.
Building Skills: To support this, the government is also training 85,000 engineers in advanced semiconductor manufacturing.
Building Our Own AI: The Sovereignty Strategy
On the AI front, India is moving just as fast to reduce dependence on foreign systems.
The IndiaAI Mission (a Rs 10,371 crore program) is powering the development of six indigenous LLMs.
Powerful Models: Two of these models are set to be massive, with 120 billion parameters.
Infrastructure Support: The mission has already deployed 38,000 GPUs at a subsidized rate, enabling 12 Indian companies to build their own foundation models.
Meet Sarvam AI: Bengaluru-based startup Sarvam AI has been tapped to build India's first sovereign LLM. It will come in three variants: Sarvam-Large (for complex reasoning), Sarvam-Small (for real-time use), and Sarvam-Edge (to run directly on devices).
Timeline: The national LLM is slated for a December 2025 launch.
As Vaishnaw put it, the goal is for India to "take control of our destiny." With these announcements, it looks like that future is well underway.