AMD says India is a key market for keeping up with the growing demand for high-tech chips
Advanced Micro Devices needs India to keep up with the growing demand for its products, its executive vice president and chief technology officer told CNBC in an exclusive interview.
“We have a global workforce. Our design efforts are global and doubling down on those investments, continuing our growth in India, are all part of what we need to stay pace with the growing demand for our products,” Mark Papermaster said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.
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On Friday, AMD announced its plans to invest approximately $400 million to continue its growth in India. The investment will go toward building the firm’s largest design center, which is expected to open before the end of 2023, as well as the addition of about 3,000 engineering roles by the end of 2028.
“We started with a small number of employees in Delhi in 2001. Today, we have over 6,500 full-time employees, and over 3,500 service contractors. So it’s with a population of about 10,000 people. And we’re really pleased to be growing our investment in India — a huge part of our portfolio and product development,” said Papermaster.
AMD is one of the few firms that produces the high-end graphics processing units needed for artificial intelligence. AMD processors can be found in a wide range of devices including computers, servers and gaming consoles.
“We’re really excited about MI300, our next generation AI chip. It’s going to take on the most powerful AI chip in the industry. And it couldn’t come at a more needed time because the industry needs more AI computing power,” said Papermaster.
“And we have a design aspect of that being done in India. We now have the India design team touching almost every product that we develop in AMD,” said Papermaster.
Ruben Roy, managing director of equity research at financial services firm Stifel, said that AMD is the “only viable alternative” to Nvidia’s high-performance H100 and A100 GPUs.
“They’re pushing very hard. R&D is going up. They are investing quite aggressively in AI,” Roy said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Wednesday.
Papermaster told CNBC, “What we focus on is leveraging the latest cutting-edge semiconductor nodes. And we bring our design prowess to really differentiate our products.”
“That’s where India is so huge for us. Because if you look at our global population, about 25% of it is in India, and we are an engineering dominated workforce,” he said.
This week, the government of the state of Karnataka said that Taiwan’s Foxconn will invest more than $600 million in India as part of a phone manufacturing project as well as a separate semiconductor equipment facility.
Diversifying
Papermaster said AMD is looking into further diversifying its supply chains. This comes amid U.S.-China tensions that have impacted firms doing business in both countries.
“In terms of de-risking our manufacturing, we do have a diversified supply base. And we will continue to look at options in terms of adding more diversity to our supply base,” he said.
“As a semiconductor design company that has a strong base in India, we believe getting that diversity of the supply chain, and getting key elements of that in India, will be helpful to us.”
He further added that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a “strong program” called “Make in India” which offers incentives for semiconductor companies to develop, manufacture and assemble products in India.
In an earnings call Tuesday, Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, said that China is an important market for the firm.
She also said that there is an opportunity to develop a China-specific AI chip in order to comply with U.S. export curbs, in a move that will follow rivals Nvidia and Intel.
AMD posted better-than-expected second-quarter results on Tuesday even as the PC market shows continued weakness.
Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, May 21, 2025.
Jim Lo Scalzo | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla shares have dropped 7% from Friday’s closing price of $323.63 to the $300.71 close on Tuesday ahead of the company’s second-quarter deliveries report.
Wall Street analysts are expecting Tesla to report deliveries of around 387,000 — a 13% decline compared to deliveries of nearly 444,000 a year ago, according to a consensus compiled by FactSet. Prediction market Kalshi told CNBC on Tuesday that its traders forecast deliveries of around 364,000.
Shares in the electric vehicle maker had been rising after Tesla started a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in late June and CEO Elon Musk boasted of its first “driverless delivery” of a car to a customer there.
The stock price took a turn after Musk on Saturday reignited a feud with President Donald Trump over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the massive spending bill that the commander-in-chief endorsed. The bill is now heading for a final vote in the House.
That legislation would benefit higher-income households in the U.S. while slashing spending on programs such as Medicaid and food assistance.
Musk did not object to cuts to those specific programs. However, Musk on X said the bill would worsen the U.S. deficit and raise the debt ceiling. The bill includes tax cuts that would add around $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
The Tesla CEO has also criticized aspects of the bill that would cut hundreds of billions of dollars in support for renewable energy development in the U.S. and phase out tax credits for electric vehicles.
Such changes could hurt Tesla as they are expected to lower EV sales by roughly 100,000 vehicles per year by 2035, according to think tank Energy Innovation.
The bill is also expected to reduce renewable energy development by more than 350 cumulative gigawatts in that same time period, according to Energy Innovation. That could pressure Tesla’s Energy division, which sells solar and battery energy storage systems to utilities and other clean energy project developers.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that Musk was, “upset that he’s losing his EV mandate,” but that the tech CEO could “lose a lot more than that.” Trump was alluding to the subsidies, incentives and contracts that Musk’s many businesses have relied on.
SpaceX has received over $22 billion from work with the federal government since 2008, according to FedScout, which does federal spending and government contract research. That includes contracts from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, among others.
Tesla has reported $11.8 billion in sales of “automotive regulatory credits,” or environmental credits, since 2015, according to an evaluation of the EV maker’s financial filings by Geoff Orazem, CEO of FedScout.
These incentives are largely derived from federal and state regulations in the U.S. that require automakers to sell some number of low-emission vehicles or buy credits from companies like Tesla, which often have an excess.
Regulatory credit sales go straight to Tesla’s bottom line. Credit revenue amounted to approximately 60% of Tesla’s net income in the second quarter of 2024.
WATCH: Threats to SpaceX & Tesla as Musk, Trump feud heats up
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.
Yara Nardi | Reuters
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.
The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.
Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.
The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.
Bezos is ranked third in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index with a net worth of about $240 billion. He’s behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk at $363 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at $260 billion.
WATCH: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ wedding sparks Venice protests
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
WATCH: Google buyouts highlight tech’s cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom
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