Every year India installs 50 million smart electricity meters but the thing is every chip inside the meters are imported.
An Indian company, Vervesemi, now makes a qualified, ready-to-use alternative. It has even been shown to the Power Ministry. But there is still no mechanism to put that chip into a single meter due to the way the market is today.
This market-product-ecosystem gap is what Indian semiconductor industry champions need to address.
- the country can now make the chip
- and still can't get it used.
Theoretically.
- A chip can now be designed, fabricated and packaged on Indian soil.
- The full sequence, for the first time
Ecosystem:
- 24 funded design startups
- plus 50+ multinational design centres
- an engineering talent base roughly a lakh strong
- 3 packaging units running, 4 more coming
- and Tata's Dholera fab due to produce its first silicon in 2026
So why does the imported chip still win?
Price:
Indian packaging runs 3–5x foreign cost, and one fab quote came back 20% above the Taiwan line it was meant to replace
The old cost edge is gone:
chip-design salaries in Bengaluru now rival the US, so "cheaper in India" no longer holds
Procurement:
government tenders pick the lowest bidder, so an Indian chip that costs 2x at the start is disqualified before it can ever scale down
Paperwork:
even importing a chip to test it can stall on customs and central-bank rules written for finished goods rather than bare silicon
MAINLY -> No pull:
the "product company" layer - firms that turn a chip design into something a manufacturer actually orders - doesn't exist in India yet
What would change it:
- Preferential foundry pricing until Indian fabs scale?
- A procurement carve-out so Indian chips aren't auto-rejected on price alone?
- A rule that counts the actual chip content of a device, not just the resistors and connectors around it
All these changes are expected in the mission's next policy phase, due before July 2026
We've had a good start with the fab and packaging units. The product->market ecosystem needs building now.
For those invested in/closely following the Indian semiconductor space this 6000 word deep dive is a must read 👇
https://t.co/mMdHf3JHIZ
Pretty good for TTMI
"U.S. Congress are pushing the Protecting Circuit Boards and Substrates Act, offering a 25% tax credit to companies choosing U.S.-made PCBs and planning to allocate $3 billion to subsidize domestic manufacturers. $TTM Technologies and Sanmina, two U.S.-listed PCB manufacturers, are accelerating domestic capacity expansion: TTM will build large new factories in New York State and Wisconsin, bringing the U.S. total to 18 facilities upon completion."
@Alex_Intel_ Korean media are saying that the Korean won has become a “DRAM dollar,” like the petrodollar.
Even if Korea earns dollars, it can’t really convert them back into won because the companies need to invest in the U.S.
Our internal data shows Claude is accelerating AI development—a possible path to recursive self-improvement, or AI autonomously building a more capable successor.
It’s happening faster than we thought, and the implications deserve greater attention. https://t.co/OVVPJO7VQx
Underrated thing is that Indian soft power has actually *receded*, significantly. As late as 2016 (with the film Dangal becoming huge in China) India had a respectable amount of soft power via bollywood exports which are now squeezed from all sides by Turkish/East Asian products
US Defence Secretary Hegseth at Shangri-la Dialogue
"In South Asia, India is a critical anchor to hold the line. A powerful India acting in its own self-interest advances our shared goal of maintaining a balance of power across the region..."
Vdo csty: IISS
I’ve always wondered, why can’t we run CPU’s hotter?
Look at any modern CPU, and the maximum junction temperature (TJMax) is around 95ish C.
Leakage current explodes past that point, and reliability drops off a cliff.
But the question is…couldn’t you make a “tougher” transistor? The answer is…sorta.
The Glenn research center at NASA experiments with silicon carbide wafers. Venus is crazy hot (~470C!). Apparently, NASA has been somewhat successful running a medium-scale IC at 500C for 1 year.
Ozark IC also won a contract to develop a multicore RISC-V cpu intended to operate at 500C, but I haven’t seen updates in a while.
Perhaps an EE can chime in. Is ~95C TJMax just a local optimum that everyone collectively settled on? How much density would you have to give up to run things just a little bit hotter?
I wonder if a special, “low density space H100” could reliably run at say, ~150C, or if that’s completely outside the realm of what’s feasible.
"you can outsource your thinking, but you can’t outsource your understanding"
easy to forget in todays AI era, worth remembering everyday as we all wield more intelligence!
@AlphaTrader00@zephyr_z9@VKMacro is a legend and honestly I emphatically agree with him at this point - you have to have a view on a lot more than just “this is a bottleneck” to expect to outperform durably from here