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Amidst the gloom of the RG Kar affair or the Tirupati laddu scam or even the continued terrorist attacks in Jammu & Kashmir, even after the completion of the first general election in the state, we find hope and encouragement when the founder of Nvidia, Jensen Huang, in his recent visit to India says “India will be a gigantic opportunity for us”.

India’s dream of becoming a global hub for manufacturing semiconductors was ignited with the setting up of the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) under the Digital India Corporation. Under the programme, the Prime Minister

recently announced to set up three semi-conductor manufacturing units – two in Gujarat and one in Assam – valued at ` 1.25 lakh crore. This came after the signing of the MOU between the US President Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the Semiconductor Supply Chain and Innovation Partnership last year. The MOU brought in promises of US IT giants like Micron Technology, Foxconn, Corning and others to invest heavily in semiconductors and allied equipment in India in partnership with Tata Electronics, Reliance, Vedanta, L&T and Murugappa.

However, in starting to walk into the future some of the common myths have to be broken and this is what the Nvidia chief did in his recent visit to India. First he dispelled fears of AI taking away our jobs. “AI will not take your job. The person who uses AI is going to take your job,” said Huang, “AI has no possibility of doing everything we do. But it can do 20% of our jobs 1,000 times better. So, everyone should use AI for that 20%,” he said. Technology will not replace humans but make them better performers.

Secondly, he warned India in not competing with the world in just becoming another manufacturer of semiconductors. India should focus more on developing local infrastructure and capabilities for exporting artificial intelligence (AI) than manufacturing semiconductors that power the AI revolution. “Remember, other countries have been manufacturing chips…for a long time. No one manufactures intelligence at the moment. Before every other country jumps into that, India should jump into it.”

He said that India needed to stop providing its labour for software development done elsewhere.“Why export the labour while the software is built elsewhere? Why not manufacture the intelligence here and then export it. You have the data, energy, and the infrastructure. You have the critical ingredients in the country to be able to harvest the raw data, and transform it into intelligence,” he added.

“There are many Indians out there who will enjoy Hindi on their phone, everywhere around the world. Those tokens should be manufactured here (India). That intelligence should be manufactured here.” It makes complete sense that India should manufacture its own AI, instead of outsourcing data to import intelligence. India should not export flour, and import bread.

Leveraging its own resources, India should look forward to building a ‘intelligence industry’ rather than an “IT industry”. The first step towards an AI –enabled India or the proposed intelligence industry will be building the ‘ecosystem’. Nvidia and Reliance pledged to build the infrastructure. Mukesh Ambani in his interaction with

Jensen explained what he is doing to build the massive infrastructure in Jamnagar. It’s a hugely capital intensive industry and India’s efforts to build the semiconductor infrastructure did start quite early in the 1970s in Mohali, but it did not take off. India lost the race then and the physical infrastructure of chip making shifted to places like China, Taiwan and Korea. The pandemic has given the opportunity of relocating the industry and India has rightly taken up the challenge. But the world has moved far ahead since then. Therefore, Jensen’s advice not to restrict to semiconductors and chip making but to think of  an ‘intelligence industry’ as a whole makes more sense for India today.