India not part of US-led nine-nation semicon supply chain coalition

The US has launched Pax Silica, a nine-member coalition to secure the semiconductor supply chain from minerals to AI infrastructure. India, building its chip ecosystem, has been left out

The United States (US) has announced a new nine-member coalition of countries that play a vital role in the global semiconductor supply chain ecosystem.

 

The strategic initiative, aimed at building a “secure, prosperous, and innovation-driven silicon supply chain — from critical minerals and energy inputs to advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and logistics”, has Japan, the Republic of Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia as its members, the US Department of State said in a press release. The participating countries are collectively called the Pax Silica.

 

“Together, these countries are home to the most important companies and investors powering the global AI supply chain,” the US Department of State’s press note said.

 

The new initiative, it said, aims to reduce the ‘coercive dependencies’ in the semiconductor supply chain ecosystem, “protect the materials and capabilities” that are foundational to the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), and ensure that member countries can “develop and deploy transformative technologies at scale,” the Department of State said.

 

Interestingly, India, which is also building an indigenous semiconductor supply chain ecosystem from scratch, has been left out of this alliance. The country is home to a large chunk of the global semiconductor chip design ecosystem.

 

In 2021, the central government, under the $10 billion India Semiconductor Mission (ISM), announced its intent to attract both global and Indian companies to set up chip fabrication and packaging facilities. So far, the government has approved 10 projects with a cumulative investment of ₹1.6 trillion under the ISM umbrella.

 

The partner countries of the Pax Silica initiative will work together and with the US to secure strategic stacks across the global technology supply chain, software applications and platforms, frontier foundation models, information connectivity and network infrastructure, compute and semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, transportation logistics, minerals refining and processing, and energy.

 

Apart from the initiatives in the semiconductor space, the Indian government has also announced a ₹10,372 crore IndiaAI Mission that is aimed at making indigenous large language models with a better understanding of the country’s data and context, and bringing graphics processing units (GPUs), a crucial hardware input for the development of AI, into the country.

 

The overall GPU capacity of the country now stands at 34,333 GPUs, nearly twice the 18,417 that had been onboarded by companies at the end of the first round of bidding for bringing GPUs into the country under the IndiaAI Mission. This expanded compute capacity on the cloud is expected to provide a common computational AI platform for training and inference, crucial to developing indigenous foundational models and AI solutions tailored to the Indian context.