Applied Materials Executive Says India Has Opportunity to Move from Participant to Shaper of Global Semiconductor Industry

Dr Suraj Rengarajan, Managing Director and Principal Technologist at Applied Materials India, opened his remarks at COSEIN 2026 with a personal note: he moved to India in 2007, he said, because he was told a fab was coming. "And so it's finally here."

Rengarajan told participants that the global semiconductor industry will cross the $1 trillion mark this year   four years earlier than the 2030 target widely used in industry forecasting, and driven primarily by AI. "If there is one thing you remember from this," he said, "the opportunity is today, it is happening now."

He distinguished between digital AI, already in widespread use, and physical AI  systems that sense and act in the real world. The latter, he argued, represents the much larger long-term opportunity: "That is when AI comes to you, AI senses, acts, and that to me is a bigger embodiment of AI."

On India's position, Rengarajan was direct about the gap. The country has the bookends: an established design ecosystem on one side, and a growing end market driven by demographics and technology adoption on the other  with projections of $100–400 b...