AMD Corporate VP Stresses Design Innovation and Heterogeneous Computing for India's Semiconductor Future

Deepak Agarwal, Corporate Vice President at AMD leading its Bengaluru site, told participants at recently concluded COSEIn 2026 that the conversation about semiconductors has shifted fundamentally: "For decades, semiconductor chips enabled technology trends silently from behind the scene. Today, there is an acknowledgement that semiconductors are the strategic infrastructure."

Agarwal opened with a historical anchor: AI is not new, he said, tracing the concept to John McCarthy's paper at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, 70 years ago. What has changed is the ability to compute. "For decades, artificial intelligence was constrained by our processing power. Advancements in the semiconductor industry  through better processor architecture, faster memory, networking, massive parallel computing enabled us to deploy and train AI at scale." The current revolution, he argued, is built on semiconductor advances.
The relationship has since become a virtuous cycle: semiconductor enhancement enabled AI, and AI demand is now pushing semiconductor innovation. The compute figures he cited illustrated the scale: 1.5 to 2 billion global AI users, ChatGPT alone with more than one billion subscriptions, every query generating tokens that require processing. India's peak power demand is around 260 gigawatts; today's data centres already consume half that figure, and AI infrastruc...