India has a once-in-a-generation semiconductor demand window: Infosys SVP Vikram Meghal

New Delhi: India is witnessing a "once-in-a-generation demand window" in the semiconductor market and must transition from "Engineered in India" to "Invent in India" by taking ownership of complete systems and products, Infosys Senior Vice President Vikram Meghal said on Friday.

Speaking at SEMICON India 2026, Meghal said the traditional semiconductor pipeline is breaking amid massive shifts driven by artificial intelligence (AI), geopolitical supply chain challenges, and a transition from Moore's Law towards system-level scaling.

"AI data centre spend is projected to reach USD 6.7 trillion in the next few years, and 50 per cent of that spend is going to be compute, memory, and networking chips," Meghal said, adding that the industry is seeing a shift where the workload is now driving how chips are designed, rather than the chip driving the workload.


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He identified three major demand fronts for the country: Made for India, Engineered in India, and Invent in India.

Under "Made for India", Meghal pointed out that while mobile phone localisation has begun, the market is expected to expand multifold in the next four to five years, with domestic content currently at only 23 per cent.

On the "Engineered in India" front, he said ER&D spending is expected to grow by 1.8 times from current levels in the coming years, building on the country's established capability of delivering engineering at scale.

However, Meghal stressed that the highest value capture lies in "Invent in India", driven by the global market for custom chips, which is expected to surge as companies design application-specific silicon.

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"So far, we have just been capturing the engineered-in-India value. Now, there is a potential for global products to capture the innovation value and start looking at inventing in India itself. That's really where we will do justice to the decades of investment that we have done in building this ecosystem," he said.

He urged the industry to build "strategic patience" to make large bets for the long term, develop a product mindset, focus on regulatory compliance, and work towards owning the entire technology stack rather than focusing solely on the silicon.