According to Intel, the Bengaluru campus has about 14,000 full-time employees and thousands of contractors working on everything from CPU and GPU design to developing various software. This is Intel’s largest research and development center outside the United States, and people here work with teams in several other countries. Of these, 3,000 are dedicated to the company’s data center and AI teams, which are responsible for the Xeon CPU family, dedicated high-performance GPUs, custom chips called FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays), and all the interconnect and supporting hardware and making them working software. You may not see these products in your usual hardware store, but they are used in many of the servers that power today’s major websites and online services, as well as supercomputers such as the recently completed Aurora.
Gadgets 360 had the opportunity to participate in a conversation with Sandra Rivera, Intel’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Data Center and Artificial Intelligence Group, who visited the Bengaluru campus this week. Below are some excerpts from the conversation about what the company thinks about the ambitions of its team, India as a data center market, the future of computing needs, and more.
What Intel’s team in India and engineers here do is:
Sandra Rivera: They are working on our CPU. They are working on our FPGA. They run on our GPUs and AI accelerators. The teams here are critical to everything in the data center portfolio; hardware and silicon development. This is the Gaudi portfolio, Gaudi 2 and 3, which will be available next year. The team here is an open development team that actually delivers the product with our team in Israel. We do software development in Poland, and of course we work in the US, but most of the development happens mainly in India and Israel.
We built the team after the acquisition (Habana Labs); it was a new investment we made four years ago, and we’re very proud of what the team has done. The quality, execution discipline and competitiveness of the product portfolio has been outstanding and we are very excited about the demand for these products.
On investing more in India and where there is potential for growth:
Sandra Rivera: Some of the opportunities we see exist in the development of ODM, OEM and electronics manufacturing. All over the world (some of the companies we have relationships with) see opportunities in India. They are investing in India and we are investing with them. We work deeply with the ecosystem. If you look at what we’ve been doing with our supply chains in Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam and other parts of the world over the decades, we think a lot of things are going to happen here. So we see electronics manufacturing as a great opportunity. We will invest in the ecosystem. We’re going to work with them to make sure they’re able to bring their products to market, and you’re seeing a lot of multinational companies coming here that are in the server and ODM business. We think it’s exciting.
We have invested over US$9 billion during our time in India. We actually built several new buildings a year or two before COVID hit, and now they’re filling up again, which is what we’d love to see. But beyond that, I don’t have any specific dollar amounts.
On manufacturing in India and whether the workforce here is competitive enough to scale up with the rest of the world:
Sandra Rivera: India can certainly scale up! India can certainly rise to this moment. It’s a huge market; the number of STEM graduates from Indian universities; the workforce; the growth of the middle class; knowledge workers… We see this as a fantastic growth market and opportunity. So there is absolutely no reason why India cannot be a world leader in technology and manufacturing.
In fact, one of the things I’m most excited to see is that the number of women graduating with technical degrees actually exceeds the number of men. I think this is a fantastic opportunity for more women to enter the tech industry, and Intel is a big supporter of a diverse workforce and has all the benefits that come with a rich, diverse workforce. So I think there are excellent chip development skills. Every one of my key programs: CPU, GPU, AI, accelerators, and FPGA; we have those skills here. Of course, there is a lot of software talent here, and it has been for decades, and we know that software is an important unlocker of hardware capabilities. So we think it’s a huge growth move.
I think Israel (and of course Silicon Valley) has always been at the forefront when it comes to start-ups and entrepreneurial culture. We see this growing really rapidly in India; more startups every day. India has now entered this high-tech market, skipping a lot of things that you don’t have to go through. When you look at America’s infrastructure, there’s a lot of cables and wires and copper. India just skipped all of that and went straight to wireless and 5G. (There are) so many innovative technologies, and innovative business models. What Reliance Jio and Tata have done here over the years… I just think the pace of progress is much faster because India can see what’s happening in other more mature markets and skip a few generations of technologies that are not at the forefront. So it’s an exciting time and a great ecosystem of markets and investments that we serve.
We have a highly skilled workforce here, and we continue to invest in hardware and software engineering, validation, and all the work that goes into building a product. We will work with our customers and the ecosystem as we see more data gravity and sovereignty, data originating in India wants to be processed in India. All the infrastructure that’s being built for this is clearly a core growth opportunity for our product. I think it’s an exciting opportunity for us to work with the ecosystem and invest in software and hardware startups and partners.
About the Indian market and overall goals:
Sandra Rivera: So today it’s small but growing. We see more data centers and infrastructure being built here. We are of course aware of the amount of data being created (and growing). Computing needs to get to where data is created and consumed, so I think that will be a growing market for us as India and every part of our lives continue to digitize. Historically, we have had good relationships with telecommunications companies and communications service providers here. They offer more services and we see more payment apps and native financial capabilities. We think we’re in the early stages of this market size. We have a long history of early stage investing; we were the first in Taiwan, Israel, Vietnam and Malaysia. We like to be at the bottom of the growth opportunities.
Some responses have been condensed and slightly edited for clarity.
Disclosure: Intel sponsored the flight of journalists to the Bengaluru event.
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