Micron’s investment in Gujarat will make India global hub for semiconductor manufacturing: Official

Idaho-headquartered semiconductor major Micron Technology's largest ever investment in Sanand, Gujarat, will make India a global hub for semiconductor manufacturing, said a senior official here at Nasscom Future Forge conclave on Tuesday.

With a total proposed investment of $2.75 billion — it is the largest so far under the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM). While Micron has committed $825 million, the rest will be covered by state and central government subsidies.

The company broke ground for its semiconductor testing and assembly plant in Gujarat’s Sanand in September, barely three months after the US chipmaker announced its intent to set up the unit.


"We're very patent heavy. We've contributed more than 54,000 patents. We have more than 3,000 people in Hyderabad and Bengaluru. We're very excited for our new manufacturing facility in Gujarat. This is going to be the largest ever investment in semiconductor manufacturing in India and is going to make the country a global hub in semiconductor manufacturing," said Sumit Sadana, executive vice president and chief business officer, Micron Technology.

He was speaking about India’s importance to Micron, including their growing presence in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and their new multi-billion-dollar semiconductor assembly, testing, marking, packaging (ATMP) manufacturing location in Sanand, Gujarat.

"Micron has a really strong portfolio here in India. We are using AI across the company to do a lot more than just develop products. We are using it to make our company more efficient, in manufacturing fabs, improve software programming capabilities, and search," Sadana said.

AI is going to change every aspect of how we live, disrupting every industry and market, he said. Micron plays a critical role in enabling AI, and its memory and storage technology, and product investments are positioning Micron to enable AI growth, he added.

Talking about Micron's expanding footprint in India, he said the company will create more than 5,000 direct jobs and more than 15,000 community jobs.

As of November this year, among the company's more than 3,100 employees, 31% are new college graduates, 28% are women, and more than 300 patents have been filed in India.

Among AI challenges ahead, he said, achieving broad adoption and trust is a challenge, given the complexity. Among other challenges are lack of regulation or potential for over regulation of AI, bias and discrimination trained into models, moral dilemmas, exacerbation of economic inequalities, loss of human-to-human connections, loss of human intuition, critical thinking, and creativity; safety and privacy concerns, cyber security threats, unintended catastrophic consequences, intentional malicious manipulation of models, misinformation and deepfakes, and (lack of) accountability and justice system, he said.