American chipmaker Micron to begin commercial production in India by month-end: Meity official

Micron Technology will begin commercial production of semiconductor chips by the end of February, electronics and information technology secretary S Krishnan said on Monday. This will kick off factory production from facilities approved in the first phase of the India Semiconductor Mission.

Speaking at the IndiaAI Impact Summit, Krishnan said US-based Micron is working on high bandwidth memory, a key component necessary for widening AI usage.

The government has also set the ground for AI compute in India, the secretary added. "We have encouraged the private sector to invest in establishing data centres and AI-based compute extensively,” he emphasised. “And … instead of directly subsidizing the establishment of AI-based compute, we've said that we would subsidise access. In a sense, we have underwritten the market and ensured that researchers, innovators, small and medium enterprises, students, all of them have access at reasonable prices to AI compute," he said.


Data centre disruption

Krishnan said the government has clarified the tax treatment of overseas entities that want to establish AI cloud capacity or data centre capacity in India intended for global service.

"India is today one of the largest power grids in the world, has abundant renewable energy and therefore with green power can sustain data centre capacity on a very large scale," he said.

That should help both India and the rest of the world in terms of having an essential part of the (data centre) pipeline, Krishnan stressed.