India is making significant progress in the semiconductor manufacturing design, although a new industry, the entire ecosystem is getting ready in the country, said Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics and IT in Bengaluru on Saturday (February 7, 2026).

Commenting on the progress the country has been making in the sector, Minister Vaishnaw, while releasing the new 2-nanometre Qualcomm chip in Bengaluru, said the developments marked a change in India’s earlier role as a software service provider and a back-office to an end-to-end semiconductor product design and development hub.

“Today, we unveiled the two-nanometre wafer, two-nanometre chip at Qualcomm. This is part of a series of developments where companies are now designing in the country to develop the industry,” the Minister said, adding that the announcement of the 2-nanometre chip tape cut by Qualcomm also indicated how global firms were now trusting India with their most advanced semiconductor work.

Each chip carried supercomputing power, with about 20–30 billion transistors per die (silicon). That kind of density allowed a GPU and a CPU to sit within a small chip, Mr. Vaishnaw elaborated, showing the wafer to the media. “The final module can function as an AI computer across devices: desktops and cameras to routers, automobiles, trains, aircraft, networking equipment and industrial systems etc supporting edge computing and AI-led high performance computing applications,” he said.

Later speaking at a press conference, the Minister said, this breakthrough placed India firmly in the league of countries working on cutting-edge chip design, alongside companies such as AMD that have already showcased such capabilities.

“Data centres are going to be a major growth journey in the coming years. So far, we have committed $70 billion dollars in investments, with recent announcements the figure will be $90 billion,” the Minister said. Semiconductors were a long-term national project which has a scope for a multi-decade journey and based on industry discussions, he said the investments could further rise in the coming years and may exceed $200 billion as AI adoption accelerates, he indicated.

On talent preparedness, Mr. Vaishnaw said, under the Semicon 1.0 mission, the government had set a target of training 85,000 semiconductor professionals over 10 years. In four years, some 67,000 semiconductor engineers were trained. Students in some 315 universities and colleges have access to electronic automation tools and were actively involved in designing chips, he added.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. on Saturday (February 7, 2026) announced the tape-out of its 2nm semiconductor design in Bengaluru, as the company highlighted the contributions and collaboration of its largest engineering workforce outside the United States.

The tape-out phase refers to one of the last stages in the semiconductor design process, before formally transitioning the product to the manufacturing stage.

The event took place at the Qualcomm Bengaluru facility, and during the visit of the Union Minister of Railways, Information & Broadcasting, Ashwini Vaishnaw.

“The Qualcomm Bengaluru campus serves as a key engineering center for development across next-generation wireless, AI, compute, and system-level technologies,” shared the company in a press release.

Qualcomm highlighted that its presence in India spanned more than 20 years of continuous investment, and made note of its engineering development centres in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad.

The company referred to India’s emergence as a “critical hub” for advanced semiconductor development and stressed on the importance of strengthening domestic chip design capabilities.

“India is increasingly at the center of how advanced semiconductor technologies are being designed for the future. Seeing Qualcomm’s work here, its engineering strength, deep design capabilities, and long-standing commitment to India, is truly impressive. Milestones like this demonstrate how far India’s design ecosystem has come and align strongly with our vision of building a globally competitive semiconductor industry,” said Mr. Vaishnaw.

“This milestone reflects over two decades of Qualcomm’s commitment to India, investing in talent, building advanced engineering capabilities, and operating at a scale that enables us to support our stakeholders in their digital transformation journeys. India today plays a key role in how we support the design, development, and delivery of next‑generation technologies for the world. The innovation being developed here is helping shape the future of connectivity, computation, and intelligent systems globally,” said Savi Soin, President, Qualcomm India.