How India’s Talented Engineers Have Powered The Rise Of Companies Like NVIDIA

NVIDIA's quiet start in India now fuels its AI dominance, while Intel’s decline highlights India’s lasting engineering power in tech.

25 Oct 2024 11:53 AM IST

Sunil Nanda, a BITS Pilani graduate, founded the India design centre for NVIDIA Graphics in Bengaluru in 2004, just 11 years after the company was founded in 1993 in the US. A job description I found from that period said NVIDIA was looking for talented people passionate about the visual computing industry.

“We want individuals who are highly motivated and strive for perfection in their work. If you want to be part of a company that is shaping every pixel on millions of screens across the world, come join us,” the advertisement said.

By the time NVIDIA’s design and engineering centre came up 20 years ago, chip giant Intel had already been present in the city for about five to six years. Intel was the big brand and draw, including for journalists like me who chased visiting Intel brass for interviews. Not many cared for NVIDIA except for the tech and gaming media. After all, it was just a gaming chip.

Intel’s largest engineering site outside the US today is in India and it has over 13,000 employees, of which 90% are engineers. NVIDIA’s presence in the country is sizable too, but smaller in absolute numbers, being a smaller organisation as well. Founder Jensen Huang is presently visiting India and getting a rockstar treatment, being feted across events and appearances, as he is elsewhere in the world.

Thousands turned up to see him and thus delayed an event featuring him in Mumbai on Thursday.

Until quite liter...

Sunil Nanda, a BITS Pilani graduate, founded the India design centre for NVIDIA Graphics in Bengaluru in 2004, just 11 years after the company was founded in 1993 in the US. A job description I found from that period said NVIDIA was looking for talented people passionate about the visual computing industry.

“We want individuals who are highly motivated and strive for perfection in their work. If you want to be part of a company that is shaping every pixel on millions of screens across the world, come join us,” the advertisement said.

By the time NVIDIA’s design and engineering centre came up 20 years ago, chip giant Intel had already been present in the city for about five to six years. Intel was the big brand and draw, including for journalists like me who chased visiting Intel brass for interviews. Not many cared for NVIDIA except for the tech and gaming media. After all, it was just a gaming chip.

Intel’s largest engineering site outside the US today is in India and it has over 13,000 employees, of which 90% are engineers. NVIDIA’s presence in the country is sizable too, but smaller in absolute numbers, being a smaller organisation as well. Founder Jensen Huang is presently visiting India and getting a rockstar treatment, being feted across events and appearances, as he is elsewhere in the world.

Thousands turned up to see him and thus delayed an event featuring him in Mumbai on Thursday.

Until quite literally a couple of years ago, Jensen Huang’s visits to India would have been largely unnoticed except by tech media.

A $3.4 trillion dollar market capitalisation number, in the breathing distance of Apple, obviously has changed many things. It is also a reminder of how rapidly things change in the technology world.

Intel, the ruler in the chip space for decades, has lost its pre-eminent leadership position thanks to the shift to high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) chips and NVIDIA’s rapid dominance in that space. Reports in August suggested Intel would lay off some 15,000 people even as talk of the company being acquired surfaced, an unthinkable proposition a year ago.

What Was India’s Role?

India has played a role in the global rise of these companies as well. Intel and NVIDIA arrived in Bengaluru more than two decades ago because they saw potential in India’s engineers as much as the market where they both sold their products. On both counts, India has served the global technology industry well. But tomorrow’s winners will typically arrive quietly today and only if they see raw potential, as these chip companies did once.

When NVIDIA’s first key India hire Nanda started with a little over a hundred colleagues, the company was looking for talented people passionate about the visual computing industry. Today, people don't speak of its gaming chips but rather about its dominance in AI, another reflection of the pace of technology and how companies pivot over the years.

"We know from experience that India is home to some of the world's brightest engineers, as many of our top employees today are originally from there. India is strategic to NVIDIA and we are delighted to become a member of the Bangalore community," Huang had said in 2005.

He could well be making the statement today. That is a good reassurance and reminder of India’s strengths and in some ways challenges ahead, if it has to stay relevant in the global technology race.

Updated On: 1 Nov 2024 2:17 PM IST
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