British chip designer Graphcore (part of SoftBank Group) plans to invest 1 billion pounds (approximately NT$40.93 billion) in India to establish a new R&D center and expand the local team. The announcement is expected to be made official when British Prime Minister Keir Starmer leads a business delegation to India this week.
Informed sources pointed out that Graphcore plans to set up a research and development base in Bangalore (Bengaluru) and will recruit approximately 500 engineering and research personnel in the next five years to strengthen artificial intelligence (AI) chip design and algorithm development capabilities. Neither Graphcore nor parent company SoftBank Group responded for comment on the specific investment content.
Graphcore was once regarded as a potential competitor of NVIDIA, focusing on the design of high-performance AI accelerators. The company was once valued at $2.8 billion in 2020, but then fell into a slump as commercialization was hampered. SoftBank completed the acquisition in 2024, and Graphcore later announced that it would expand its R&D base in the UK and overseas and return to the global AI chip competition stage. This investment in India is seen as a key step for SoftBank to integrate British and European technology with the Asian market.
India has a huge domestic demand market of 1.4 billion people and is regarded as the next wave of AI technology application. International technology giants including NVIDIA, Microsoft and Meta also regard India as a potential growth engine outside of China. However, India’s AI infrastructure is still in its infancy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is promoting the localization of semiconductors. It is expected that the first batch of "Indian-made chips" will be available by the end of this year, but the initial process will still be based on mid- to low-end processes.
The Modi government has established an industrial fund of 760 billion rupees (approximately NT$258.4 billion) to attract investment from global chip manufacturers. However, large corporate commitment is still lacking. The two projects currently progressing the fastest include: Tata Group and Power Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd.’s cooperation to build a US$11 billion wafer fab, and Micron Technology (Micron)’s investment of US$3 billion in a packaging and testing plant.
At the same time, according to Bloomberg, OpenAI is also evaluating cooperation with local companies and plans to build a data center of at least 1GW in India to support the training and computing needs of generative AI models.
As U.S.-China technological tensions and export controls continue to heat up, the AI industry is entering a new round of "geo-technological restructuring period." Although U.S. companies still dominate GPU and cloud computing power, Japan, Europe and India are accelerating to build their own "non-U.S. AI industry chain" through investment, mergers and acquisitions, and technology sharing.
SoftBank’s Graphcore Plans $1.3 Billion Chip Investment in India