A new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker shows shipments of personal computing devices are expected to grow 2.6% year over year in 2024 to 398.9 million units. The traditional PC market will remain flat in 2024 with 261 million units shipped while the tablet market is forecast to grow 7.2% year over year as a refresh cycle and project investments are expected to drive the market.

For traditional PCs, the global market excluding China is expected to grow 2.8% in 2024 as China continues to suffer through a confluence of macroeconomic challenges, including high youth employment, deflation, and a tumultuous real estate market. However, China's economic concerns have largely impacted just the PC market as tablet demand has proven to be more resilient thanks to Huawei's efforts.

Ola, an Indian automotive company, is venturing into AI chip development with its artificial intelligence branch, Krutrim, planning to launch India's first domestically designed AI chip by 2026. The company is leveraging ARM architecture for this initiative. CEO Bhavish Aggarwal emphasizes the importance of India developing its own AI technology rather than relying on external sources.

While detailed specifications are limited, Ola claims these chips will offer competitive performance and efficiency. For manufacturing, the company plans to partner with a global tier I or II foundry, possibly TSMC or Samsung. "We are still exploring foundries, we will go with a global tier I or II foundry. Taiwan is a global leader, and so is Korea. I visited Taiwan a couple of months back and the ecosystem is keen on partnering with India," Aggarwal said.

On June 5th, Vanguard and NXP announced plans to jointly establish VisionPower Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (VSMC) in Singapore to build a 12-inch wafer plant. TrendForce posits that this move reflects the trend of global supply chains shifting "Out of China, Out of Taiwan"(OOC/OOT), with Taiwanese companies accelerating their overseas expansion to improve regional capacity flexibility and competitiveness.

TrendForce noted that the semiconductor supply chain has been diversifying over the past two years to mitigate geopolitical and pandemic-related risks, forming two major segments: China's domestic supply chain and a non-China supply chain. Recent US tariff increases have accelerated this shift, leading to increased orders from American customers.

Techlusive India has reported an exclusive announcement—courtesy of ASUS India's Arnold Su—the interviewee bears an elaborate and long job title: Vice President of Consumer and Gaming PC System Business Group. The wider discussion explores the region's gaming market conditions, although Su dropped a bombshell when discussing his company's current generation handheld gaming computer. The ASUS ROG Ally rolled out midway through 2023, as one of the first mainstream Windows 11 handheld gaming PCs. Competition in this market segment has ramped up significantly since then—Lenovo's Legion Go arrived last autumn, Valve's Steam Deck OLED refresh followed two months later, and MSI unveiled its Intel Meteor Lake-powered Claw at CES 2024.

Valve is not rushing out a proper next generation Steam Deck anytime soon—an urgent or immediate response to a lot of new competition is not necessary. An MSI representative revealed to gaming news media outlets (at CES 2024) that a Claw 2 model is already in the development pipeline. ASUS appears ready to launch new handheld hardware within a relatively short period—ASUS India's VP stated: "we most likely will launch a second generation (ROG Ally) this year. We will still keep the Windows (11) features, but we will focus more on gaming." He also revealed that original Ally models have sold "around 70,000 - 80,000 units" since the launch date in India—Techlusive labels this as a promising and "kind" response. Su's analysis of recent regional sales figures shows a trend of gaming branded laptops outpacing traditional desktop, in terms of adoption rates.

Indian data center operator Yotta is reportedly set to spend big with another placed with NVIDIA—a recent Reuters article outlines a $500 million purchase of Team Green AI GPUs. Yotta is in the process of upgrading its AI Cloud infrastructure, and their total tally for this endeavor (involving Hopper and newer Grace Hopper models) is likely to hit $1 billion. An official company statement from December confirmed the existence of an extra procurement of GPUs, but they did not provide any details regarding budget or hardware choices at that point in time. Reuters contacted Sunil Gupta, Yotta's CEO, last week for a comment on the situation. The co-founder elaborated: "that the order would comprise nearly 16,000 of NVIDIA's artificial intelligence chips H100 and GH200 and will be placed by March 2025."

Team Green is ramping up its embrace of the Indian data center market, as US sanctions have made it difficult to conduct business with enterprise customers in nearby Chinese territories. Reuters state that Gupta's firm (Yotta) is: "part of Indian billionaire Niranjan Hiranandani's real estate group, (in turn) a partner firm for NVIDIA in India and runs three data centre campuses, in Mumbai, Gujarat and near New Delhi." Microsoft, Google and Amazon are investing heavily in cloud and data centers situated in India. Shankar Trivedi, an NVIDIA executive, recently attended Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit—the article's reporter conducted a brief interview with him. Trivedi stated that Yotta is targeting a March 2024 start for a new NVIDIA-powered AI data center located in the region's tech hub: Gujarat International Finance Tec-City.

This past weekend, Micron broke ground on what will be a new semiconductor assembly plant in Gujarat, India. The new facility is said to cover almost 0.4 square kilometres of land or 93 acres, on which phase one will include a 46.5 thousand square metre clean room. The first phase of the project is said to be built by Tata Projects and it's expected to start operating as early as the end of 2024, which seems somewhat optimistic considering how long it can take to build clean rooms of this size in other countries that have much more experience in building such facilities.

Micron is said to be investing a total of US$2.7 billion at the facility, although phase one has a budget of US$825 million as a first step. The full project is said to take five years to complete and is expected to bring some 5,000 direct jobs at the Micron plant. The plant will be a first-of-its-kind in India and Micron will be using it to assemble DRAM and NAND flash. Some of the investment is coming from the Indian government, but the reports don't mention how big of a share the government has contributed.

In a major step to support India's industrial sector, NVIDIA and Reliance Industries today announced a collaboration to develop India's own foundation large language model trained on the nation's diverse languages and tailored for generative AI applications to serve the world's most populous nation. The companies will work together to build AI infrastructure that is over an order of magnitude more powerful than the fastest supercomputer in India today. NVIDIA will provide access to the most advanced NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip and NVIDIA DGX Cloud, an AI supercomputing service in the cloud. GH200 marks a fundamental shift in computing architecture that provides exceptional performance and massive memory bandwidth.

The NVIDIA-powered AI infrastructure is the foundation of the new frontier into AI for Reliance Jio Infocomm, Reliance Industries' telecom arm. The global AI revolution is transforming industries and daily life. To serve India's vast potential in AI, Reliance will create AI applications and services for their 450 million Jio customers and provide energy-efficient AI infrastructure to scientists, developers and startups across India.

Underscoring NVIDIA's growing relationship with the global technology superpower, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang Monday evening. The meeting at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg—as the Prime Minister's official residence in New Delhi is known—comes as Modi prepares to host a gathering of leaders from the G20 group of the world's largest economies, including U.S. President Joe Biden, later this week.

"Had an excellent meeting with Mr. Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA," Modi said in a social media post. "We talked at length about the rich potential India offers in the world of AI." The event marks the second meeting between Modi and Huang, highlighting NVIDIA's role in the country's fast-growing technology industry.

The Indian Government on Thursday announced restrictions on the import of pre-built laptop and desktop PCs, tablets, and convertibles. These restrictions take effect immediately. The decision is designed to get major PC manufacturers such as Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, and Apple, to manufacture their devices on Indian soil, or subject each individual PC model through a lengthy import licensing regime—essentially a penalty for not manufacturing locally. The new restrictions find several parallels to India's 2020 decision to restrict import of TVs, which caused major consumer electronics firms to rush to set up local assembly lines to keep up with the country's market demand.

The restrictions on the import of PCs is seen as complicating things for PC manufacturers, especially as the country heads into its biggest consumer cycle with Diwali (Q4-2023). India's current import restrictions on smartphones and TVs have caused most consumer electronics giants to set up assembly lines in India; however these lines barely contribute 20% of value-addition to the product (i.e. much of the product comes knocked down and is simply put together); however manufacturers are incentivized to localize more of their value-addition, through the country's performance-linked incentives (PLI) scheme. Certain whitebox ODMs have localized even PCB placement, and display panel manufacturing. India's ICT imports for the period of just Q2-2023 stood at $19.7 billion, the country clocks roughly $75-90 billion in ICT/PC sales per year.

AMD today announced plans for continued growth in India through an approximate $400M investment over the next five years. The planned investment includes a new AMD campus in Bangalore, Karnataka that will serve as the company's largest design center, as well as the addition of approximately 3,000 new engineering roles by the end of 2028. The new AMD campus is expected to open before the end of 2023 and will feature extensive lab space, state-of-the-art collaboration tools and seating configurations designed to foster teamwork. The investment is supported by the various policy initiatives of the Government of India focused on the semiconductor industry.

"We welcome the AMD plan to expand its leading-edge R&D engineering operations in India," said Mr. Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Cabinet Minister for Railways, Telecommunications, Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India. "I welcome AMD's decision to set up its largest R&D design center in India and expansion of the India-AMD partnership. It will certainly play an important role in building a world class semiconductor design and innovation ecosystem. It will also provide tremendous opportunities for our large pool of highly skilled semiconductor engineers and researchers and will catalyse PM Narendra Modi's vision of India becoming a global talent hub," said Mr. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.

Natural disasters, like flooding, are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change, threatening people's safety and livelihood. It's estimated that flooding affects more than 250 million people globally each year and causes around $10 billion in economic damages.

As part of our work to use AI to address the climate crisis, today we're expanding our flood forecasting capabilities to 80 countries. With the addition of 60 new countries across Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and South and Central America, our platform Flood Hub now includes some of the territories with the highest percentages of population exposed to flood risk and experiencing more extreme weather, covering 460 million people globally.

With more countries creating initiatives to develop homegrown processors capable of powering powerful supercomputing facilities, India has just presented its development milestone with Aum HPC. Thanks to information from the report by The Next Platform, we learn that India has developed a processor for powering its exascale high-performance computing (HPC) system. Called Aum HPC, the CPU was developed by the National Supercomputing Mission of the Indian government, which funded the Indian Institute of Science, the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and C-DAC to design and manufacture the Aum HPC processors and create strong, strong technology independence.

The Aum HPC is based on Armv8.4 CPU ISA and represents a chiplet processor. Each compute chiplet features 48 Arm Zeus Cores based on Neoverse V1 IP, so with two chiplets, the processor has 96 cores in total. Each core gets 1 MB of level two cache and 1 MB of system cache, for 96 MB L2 cache and 96 MB system cache in total. For memory, the processor uses 16-channel 32-bit DDR5-5200 with a bandwidth of 332.8 GB/s. To expand on that, HBM memory is present, and there is 64 GB of HBM3 with four controllers capable of achieving a bandwidth of 2.87 TB/s. As far as connectivity, the Aum HPC processor has 64 PCIe Gen 5 Lanes with CXL enabled. It is manufactured on a 5 nm node from TSMC. With a 3.0 GHz typical and 3.5+ GHz turbo frequency, the Aum HPC processor is rated for a TDP of 300 Watts. It is capable of producing 4.6+ TeraFLOPS per socket. Below are illustrations and tables comparing Aum HPC to Fujitsy A64FX, another Arm HPC-focused design.

Foxconn has commited to $500 million of investments into new operations within Telangana, a southern state located in India. The region's IT minister, K. T. Rama Rao, broke the news earlier today and declared that the Taiwanese multinational electronics contract manufacturer will be building new factory facilities - with the first example breaking ground in Kongara Kalan (a village to the south of Hyderabad) this morning.

The minister estimates that the "first phase" of new Foxconn manufacturing plants will help generate 25,000 "direct jobs" across the state of Telangana. Reuters has previously reported that Foxconn has been granted a new contract for the manufacture of next generation AirPods - Apple is a key client for the company, and executives have pushed for a shift in production locations due to problems encountered in China. Foxconn's move into India is observed as a strategic decision - facilities are less likely to get shutdown (due to health restrictions) and the country is not getting hit with advanced semiconductor sanctions.

Due to the various major events that affected the global economy and politics, the overall demand for consumer electronics made a sharp downward turn in 2022, and global shipments of notebook (laptop) computers began to fall over the quarters. TrendForce's latest analysis finds that global shipments of notebook computers (from ODMs) reached just around 186 million units for 2022, showing a YoY drop of 24.5%. As for 2023, the outlook on the performance of the notebook computer market remains uncertain at this moment. TrendForce expects the YoY decline to moderate to about 7.8%, but shipments are projected to total only 171 million units.

Because market demand was anemic in 4Q22, promotional activities related to the traditional year-end peak season did not generate a lot of sales momentum. Looking at regional markets, notebook brands (PC OEMs) slashed prices in the US and China, but their sales results still did not meet expectations. This development was mainly attributed to factors such as high inflation suppressing consumers' disposable income. Since the sales results for 4Q22 were lackluster, efforts to get rid of the existing stockpile of whole devices might continue through 2Q23. Furthermore, order placements from channels are going to be much more restrained.

International semiconductor consortium or ISMC is a new joint venture between Abu Dhabi-based Next Orbit Ventures and Israeli Tower Semiconductor that is getting ready to invest big. The consortium is said to be looking at investing no less than US$3 billion in a chip foundry based in Karnataka, India. Maybe the most interesting part here is that Tower Semiconductor is set to be acquired by Intel, assuming the deal passes all regulatory reviews. This means that Intel could be replacing Tower Semiconductor in the consortium before the new fab has been finished.

Not much information is available about ISMC, but the planned chip plant would be one of the first foundries in India, as well as the largest foundry in the nation. So far ISMC has only signed a memorandum of Understanding with the government of Karnataka, so things could still change. However, the US$10 billion incentive by the central Indian government might be part of the reason behind the decision. Tower Semiconductor specialises in various speciality process technologies, such as SiGe, BiCMOS and SOI and manufacturer mixed-signal and RFCMOS chips, as well as CMOS based image sensors, power management chips and various types of non-volatile memory and some MEMS products for its customers. The new fab is expected to bring 1,500 direct and some 10,000 indirect jobs to the region.

At the end of 2021, there was quite a lot of noise when it came to India's homegrown semiconductor fab initiative, where the nation was trying to win over Intel, as well as some other semiconductor manufacturers. It would appear that the Indian government has stepped up its efforts and is now actively pitching to Intel, GlobalFoundries and TSMC. The main person behind this is said to be Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the minister of state for technology and entrepreneurship and a former Intel engineer. So far it seems like Chandrasekhar hasn't gotten very far according to the article The Economic Times, where he states that "We're meeting the CEOs, talking to them, making presentations."

On the other hand, recent news has suggested that Foxconn is interested in setting up some kind of foundry in India, in a partnership with local Vedanta Group. It's unclear what kind of semiconductors this would be for though, especially as Vedanta is mostly in the mining industry. The various Indian states are said to be very keen on the other hand, both in terms of getting new industry, but also in getting new investments. Earlier this month, during his tour of several Asian countries, Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger had a meeting with the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, but what came of that meeting is unclear. India is hoping to be able to reproduce the success it has had when it comes to manufacturing smartphones locally, with Samsung, Nokia and Xiaomi producing locally, as well as Taiwanese Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron, who contract manufacture Apple devices. However, semiconductors are far more complex to make than smartphones, so if India isn't willing to play the long game, it's unlikely much will come of its attempts to attract semiconductor foundries.

Back in December, we reported that Tower Semiconductor was one of several semiconductor manufacturers that was considering building a fab in India, largely due to government subsidies. Since then, Intel has stepped in and bought Tower Semiconductor and has taken over the negotiations with the Indian government. What has also come to light is that Tower Semiconductor has been in discussions with the Indian government for over a decade, but apparently the two parties have been unable to come up with a suitable agreement. Tower Semiconductor was apparently ready to cancel any plans on building in India as late as September 2021, but the more recent government initiative renewed their interest.

As to exactly what kind of fab Intel would build, is unclear at this point in time, but it might still be a MEMS fab or it could simply be a testing and packaging plant. Regardless of what kind of facility it'll be, it's interesting that Intel decided to keep the ongoing plans from Tower Semiconductor going. Tower Semiconductor mostly manufactured for fabless companies and were producing some two million wafers a year. It's likely that Intel will carry on producing for the same companies at the same terms for now, although as Tower Semiconductor gets integrated closer with the Intel foundry, things could change.

Intel Corporation today announced that Christoph Schell has been appointed executive vice president and chief commercial officer to lead the Sales, Marketing and Communications Group (SMG), starting March 14. Schell will succeed Michelle Johnston Holthaus, who will take on a new role as general manager of Intel's Client Computing Group (CCG).

"Christoph has an exceptional track record of driving innovative and disruptive go-to-market strategies around the globe. He brings expertise in understanding business segments, verticals and the solutions and services customers want," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "We are harnessing our core strengths as an advantage to grow in our traditional markets and accelerate our entry into new ones. I'm confident Christoph is the right leader to take on this critical role and guide the talented SMG organization to achieve our growing ambitions."

Schell joins Intel from HP Inc., where he was most recently chief commercial officer. With his go-to-market team, he led customer and partner success, category management and customer support globally. During his 25 years with the company, Schell held various senior management roles across the globe, including president of 3D Printing & Digital Manufacturing. Prior to rejoining HP in 2014, Schell served as executive vice president of Growth Markets for Philips, where he led the lighting business across Asia Pacific, Japan, Africa, Russia, India, Central Asia and the Middle East. He started his career in his family's distribution and industrial solutions company and worked in brand management at Procter & Gamble.

Vedanta, one of India's leading multinational groups, and Hon Hai Technology Group ("Foxconn"), world's largest electronics manufacturing company, today announced signing an MOU to form a joint venture company that will manufacture semiconductors in India. This first-of-its-kind joint venture between the two companies will support Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision to create an ecosystem for semiconductor manufacturing in India.

According to the MOU signed between the two companies, Vedanta will hold the majority of the equity in the JV, while Foxconn will be the minority shareholder. Vedanta Chairman Anil Agarwal will be the Chairman of the joint venture company. The targeted project plans to invest for manufacturing semiconductors. It will provide a significant boost to domestic manufacturing of electronics in India. Discussions are currently ongoing with a few State Governments to finalize the location of the plant. The collaboration between Vedanta and Foxconn follows the India Government's recent policy announcement for Electronics Manufacturing & PLI scheme for incentivizing organizations to contribute towards development of this sector. This will be the first joint venture in the electronics manufacturing space after the announcement of the policy.

Remember that US$10 billion incentive India approved earlier this month? Well, it looks like India is planning on using at least some of that incentive to win over Intel, as the Indian Minister for IT and Electronics, Ashwini Vaishnaw welcomed Intel to India in a tweet the other day. Some news outlets seem to have taken this tweet as an agreement has already been struck, but this doesn't seem very likely, as Intel hasn't provided any kind of comment on the topic.

That said, the Indian incentive will pay for up to 50 percent of the cost of building a new fab, which we know isn't pocket change, considering that a cutting edge fab can easily cost in excess of US$10 billion. However, it seems highly unlikely that Intel would build a chip fab in India, based on the requirements for such a fab, not only in terms of logistics, but also when it comes to power and water supplies and least not a suitable labour force. What might happen is that Intel sets up something like a chip packaging plant there in the future, much like what it's planning to potentially do in Italy and that the company is expanding in Malaysia.

Over the past couple of months there have been a lot of calls for more investment into the semiconductor industry due to the current shortage of many different kinds of semiconductors. As we've seen, several government organizations have already started working on how to woo chip makers to their part of the world and the latest nation to join the fray is India.

Unlike the US and the EU where so far no firm budgets have been approved, India has already approved a US$10 billion incentive plan for semiconductor, as well as display panel manufacturers who are willing to consider India as the next location for their new fabs. According to Reuters, the Indian government is said to cover up to 50 percent of the project cost of new semiconductor and display panel fabs. So far it seems like at least three companies are interested in the scheme for semiconductor manufacturing, namely Tower Semiconductor out of Israel, Foxconn and an unnamed Singaporean consortium.

The India traditional PC market (inclusive of desktops, notebooks, and workstations) continued its growth momentum despite ongoing supply and logistical challenges. The traditional PC shipments witnessed a 30% year-over-year (YoY) growth in 3Q21 (Jul-Sep), marking the fifth consecutive quarter of growth in India, according to new data from the International Data Corporation 's (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. A total of 4.5 million PCs were shipped during the quarter, making it India's biggest-ever single quarter. To put this in perspective, it is bigger than the total yearly consumer shipments in 2019, a year before the pandemic hit us. As a result, many brands also reported their biggest quarter of PC shipments.

Notebook PCs continue to dominate the overall category with more than 80% share. Enterprise and consumer demand helped the Notebook category to reach over 3 million units for the first time, and the desktop category also continued its upward momentum as it grew by 30.5% YoY in 3Q21.

There's no secret that Taiwan has been looking at expanding its chip production to other nations, with TSMC having agreed to build a plant in Arizona, while also discussing the subject with the EU. Now it looks like a deal is being worked out with India to build further chip plants there, although it's not clear who the intended manufacturer will be, as TSMC isn't mentioned in the report by Bloomberg.

However, the piece mentions 5G devices and components for electric cars, which suggests that it might not be a cutting edge node we're looking at here, but rather something a bit more conservative like 28 or 14 nm. India would make sense in many ways, but the obvious concern once again is water supply, although so far no exact location has been mentioned for the placement of the fab.

Indian PC components retailer PrimeABGB started listing pre-built desktops based on the AMD 4700S Desktop Kit, a PC motherboard based on harvested PlayStation 5 SoCs with their iGPUs disabled. These are semi-custom SoCs originally bound for Sony, which didn't make the cut, as their iGPUs were found defective.

It appears like the desktop PrimeABGB is selling for the equivalent of $600, is integrated in-house by the retailer, and the other parts that make up the build are certainly of a comparable quality to the ones large OEMs cram in their $600 desktops. These include a SilverStone Sugo 13 Mesh case, an Antec Atom 450 W PSU, a 120 GB SATA 6 Gbps SSD, and a GeForce GT 710 handling graphics on par with basic iGPU solutions. What you're getting, though, is an 8-core/8-thread "Zen 2" CPU that's highly capable for productivity tasks, and hardwired 16 GB memory.

AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT Liquid Cooled (LC) edition is not officially available for the DIY market, as the card is exclusive to OEMs and system integrators, who can use the card in any of their selected systems, given the availability of course. In other words, the card is almost impossible to purchase on its own, unless it is from someone who removed it from a PC. However, it seems like a few retailers in India have been able to get their hands on a few of these cards and offer consumers to buy them individually without the need to purchase a whole system. Of course, you can expect this to come with a premium. Currently, retailers are offering the card at the price tag of around 223,020 rupees, which translates to 3,007 USD. We are not sure if any EU or American retailers will get their hands on just the card to compare prices.