India wants to be a global chip powerhouse in 5 years
Workers assembles smartphones at Dixon Technologies factory in Uttar Pradesh, India, on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images
India wants to be among the world’s top five semiconductor producers in the next five years, said Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister of electronics and information technology, railways and communications.
The chip industry “is a very complex market, and global value chains and global supply chains are extremely complex in the current context,” Vaishnaw said on CNBC’s Street Signs Asia on Friday. “We think in the next five years, we would be among the top five semiconductor nations in the world.”
As of December, Taiwan holds about 46% of global semiconductor foundry capacity, followed by China (26%), South Korea (12%), the U.S. (6%) and Japan (2%), according to market intelligence firm TrendForce.
India will stand to benefit as more companies look to reduce reliance on China as U.S.-China tensions show no signs of ending soon.
He said India sees itself as a “trusted value chain partner” for electronic device manufacturers, industrial and defense electronics, power electronics — “practically every electronics manufacturer, which requires semiconductors to be designed… and manufactured.”
“Some people call it ‘friendshoring.’ I call it ‘trust shoring’ because there is a global trust in India,” Vaishnaw said.
On Thursday, U.S. chip giant Qualcomm opened a new design center in Chennai. The facility will focus on wireless technology design and create 1,600 jobs in the country.
“We started investing in India before it was popular. We have been building a presence in India for more than a decade now,” Qualcomm CEO told CNBC affiliate CNBC TV-18. “A lot of our chips are designed in India, and that presence in India is also creating opportunities for a number of Indian companies.”
Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated three semiconductor plants. One of those plants is a joint venture between Tata Electronics and Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. PSMC Chairman Frank Huang told the Economic Times the goal is to create India’s first semiconductor chip by 2026
“Made in India chips manufactured in India will help create a strong and significant presence for India in global value chains — it will make India a semicon hub for the world,” Union Minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar said in a press release.
Vaishnaw seemed unfazed when asked about investors expressing concern that India is still behind in its semiconductor manufacturing game and has plenty of catching up to do.
The minister predicted that the global semiconductor sector will be worth a trillion dollars within the next seven years. due to a large talent pool and the country’s focus on ramping up its manufacturing capabilities.
“This kind of growth will require close to a million more semiconductor engineers. Where is the talent pool? Where is that ecosystem for handling the complexity of this magnitude? It’s there in India,” he said.
“This is absolutely the right time to be in the semiconductor industry and we’ve very rapidly gained the confidence of the entire global industry,” the minister added.
Apple supplier Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, announced in November that it plans to invest more than $1.5 billion in India to fulfill its “operational needs.”
“Globally, all the companies look at India as a natural destination for the next investment decision,” Vaishnaw claimed, confirming recent reports that the government is reviewing semiconductor proposals totaling to $21 billion.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic on Monday announced Claude for Life Sciences, a new offering for researchers to use the company’s artificial intelligence technology in the advancement of scientific discovery.
Claude for Life Sciences is built around Anthropic’s existing AI models, but supports new connections with other scientific tools that are commonly used in labs during research and development.
It will be able to help researchers through all stages of the discovery process, from carrying out literature reviews to developing hypotheses, analyzing data, drafting regulatory submissions and more, Anthropic said.
The launch of Claude for Life Sciences marks Anthropic’s first formal entry into the sector, and comes just months after the company hired longtime industry executive Eric Kauderer-Abrams as its head of biology and life sciences.
“Now is the threshold moment for us where we’ve decided this is a big investment area,” Kauderer-Abrams told CNBC in an interview. “We want a meaningful percentage of all of the life science work in the world to run on Claude, in the same way that that happens today with coding.”
Anthropic, which is one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, develops a family of large language models called Claude. It was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, and its valuation has swelled to $183 billion in just four years.
The company launched a new model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, late last month and said it is “significantly better” at life sciences tasks like understanding laboratory protocols.
Kauderer-Abrams said researchers have already been engaging with Anthropic’s models to help with isolated parts of the scientific process, so the company decided to formally build out Claude for Life Sciences as a way to support them from start to finish.
That meant Anthropic had to establish integrations with key players in the life sciences ecosystem, including Benchling, PubMed, 10x Genomics and Synapse.org, among others. Anthropic has also partnered with companies that can help life sciences organizations adopt AI, like Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte, and cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud, the company said.
“We’re willing and enthusiastic about doing that grind to make sure that all the pieces come together,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
In a prerecorded demo, Anthropic showed how a scientist working on preclinical studies could use Claude for Life Sciences to compare two study designs that test different dosing strategies.
The scientist was able to query her lab’s data directly from Benchling, generate a summary and tables of key differences with links back to the original material. After reviewing the results, the scientist generated a study report that could be included in a regulatory submission.
Anthropic said an analysis like this used to require “days” of validating and compiling information, but now, it can be done in minutes.
Kauderer-Abrams said the company believes AI can bring about real efficiency gains for the life sciences sector, but it’s also under “no illusions” that it will magically overcome the physical limitations of conducting scientific research. Clinical trials that take three years are not suddenly going to take one month, he said.
Instead, Anthropic is focused on exploring the time-consuming, expensive parts of the discovery process “piece by piece” to determine where AI could be most useful.
“We’re here to make sure that this transformation happens and that it’s done responsibly,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
WATCH: Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model
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