How India Can Build The Next NVIDIA, One Chip At A Time

Within three decades, NVIDIA has transmutated from a graphics chip startup into the beating heart of the global AI revolution, valued at over $5 Tn in 2025, beyond Apple ($3.99 Tn), Amazon, or Google. Its GPUs now power everything from ChatGPT to autonomous vehicles.

The story of NVIDIA spans beyond Founder vision, across areas such as human perseverance, silicon breakthroughs, relentless grit, delayed gratification, patient capital, process innovations, talent compensation, and opportunistic grabbing of adjacent markets etc; supported by an ecosystem that aggressively rewards the translation of science into market goods at scale.

India today stands at the edge of a similar inflection point. 

With the Prime Minister having launched the INR 1 Lakh Cr Research, Development and Innovation (RDI) Fund, the country is signalling that it intends to move from being a consumer of global technologies to a creator of them.

The plan is to nurture homegrown champions in semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, advanced materials, and defence systems — and perhaps even to build India’s own version of NVIDIA.

There are 3 dimensions to explore, plan, and execute:

• High capex ecosystem for bootstrapping domestic compute and data sovereignty
• Lithography technologies for the current Silicon-based compute architectures
• Spectrum of technologies to pursue

High Capex Ecosystem For Bootstrapping Domestic Compute And Data Sovereignty

Holistically speaking, we can sort the key ecosystem factors into the following buckets:

• Founders – India possesses a surfeit of talent with international exposure, and government programs have wisely enabled founders and the startup culture across the country
• Talent – India has an excellent set of tier- I institutes and very good tier- II institutes that have powered Indian and western R&D. Indian corporates houses need to step up their R&D
• National Mission – Compute and Data sovereignty is necessary to overcome the AI restraints being imposed externally on India, as well as to enforce the Right to Privacy for citizens
• Market needs – India’s large and aspirational population demands best-in-class experiences; hence a huge market need exists that will reward investments in silicon innovations
• Infrastructure / Operational Efficiencies – this is where the Indian setup needs an extensive overhaul, in mindset and in practices
  • Income Tax And Customs – Remove officials who misuse AI tools, faceless systems, or their discretionary powers to make unreasonable demands. Give citizens access to the same IT data and AI tools so they can deal with officers on equal terms and easily address paperwork gaps.
  • Land – Simplify the acquisition of land via a single-window process
  • Electricity, Water, Raw Materials, Transport – the supply must be constant, flawless, reliable, inexpensive, unobstructed, and uninterrupted
• Capital
  • CBDT and other tax regimes – tax holidays and benevolent taxation interpretations for long-term venture capital investments that help the National Mission
  • RBI / SEBI – Swift approvals for large capital projects to enable sovereign Compute/Data
• Rule of Law
  • India’s IP protections are highly-regarded in the Western world
  • Physical safety, Property access enforcement – swift judicial resolutions are necessary

Lithography Technologies For The Current Silicon-based Compute Architectures

If we were to look at the node sizes used by fabs, there are 3 commercially viable segments with differentiated approaches to be adopted.

• Large-nm (180 nm to 65 nm) – This is the sweet spot for low-cost, low-tech, and high-volume chips
• Medium-nm (45 nm to 10 nm) – This is the sweet spot for low-cost, high-capability chips wherein India could import older fabs from friendly countries like South Korea and operate them domestically to build up the local ecosystem and jumpstart local capabilities
• Small-nm (7nm and below) – Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV) can deliver 7 nm nodes, but below that India would need to master the exceptionally challenging Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) for delivering 5 nm to 1 nm. For now, fabless is the best way to engage this extremely-challenging segment until we cut our teeth and achieve operational excellence with 10nm and 7nm

Spectrum Of Technologies

Finally, beyond the Silicon Intel/ARM/GPU architectures, there are other promising avenues:

• Compute-in-Memory – this is an excellent fit for India because it uses the medium-nm technology while also being much faster than traditional Von Neumann architecture (RAM to CPU/GPU and back) while also being much more energy efficient for ZettaFLOPS compute
• RISC-V – An open well-tested ISA standard that can be freely adopted to build CPUs
• POSITs – An alternative to IEEE 754 for floating point math that is up to 10,000 times power-efficient, with accuracy caveats similar to IEEE 754
• Optical computing, Silicon Photonics – for high-speed optical compute and datacom

Semiconductors are defining the cutting edge of progress, and the global semiconductor market is projected to cross $1.1 Tn by 2030.

Compute power is the foundational technology powering artificial intelligence, telecommunications, industrial automation, medical advances etc at scale. Yet the supply chain remains highly concentrated, with over 70% of advanced chips fabricated in East Asia, especially the high-value AI chips.

This dependency poses a big risk for India — the world’s fastest-growing digital economy — but it is also an opportunity. As AI adoption accelerates, so does the need for AI-specific chips, edge processors, and custom silicon for industrial and defense use.

NVIDIA’s rise offers important lessons. It began as a fabless chip designer, focusing on a niche (graphics) before expanding into AI and data centers — proving that deep specialisation and long-term conviction can create trillion-dollar companies.

Similarly, Taiwan’s TSMC emerged from public-private collaboration, while Israel’s innovation economy was built on defense R&D converted into commercial technology. India’s model must blend all three — academic depth, policy support, and entrepreneurial execution.

The RDI Fund gives India its most powerful tool yet to do so. By investing at the intersection of research, innovation, and entrepreneurship, it can transform India’s semiconductor dream into an industrial reality.

In many ways, the silicon chip has become the new currency of national capability, and we must plan wisely. As India steps into the age of AI and advanced manufacturing, it must remember: building chips isn’t just about etching circuits for a processor — it’s about carving the roadmap for a sovereign future.