At Arm’s new office in Bengalaru, Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw joins host and Arm CEO Rene Haas for a conversation about India’s semiconductor initiative.
Ashwini Vaishnaw has a unique background for a Member of the Indian Parliament: before he entered the government, he was an engineer. Now he brings that experience to bear as India’s Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting, and Electronics & Information Technology.
In this conversation, recorded on location at Arm’s new Bengalaru office, the minister tells Rene about India’s semiconductor initiative and other national programs driving technological and economic growth.
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Rene Haas [0:08]
Welcome to Tech Unheard, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the most exciting developments in technology. I’m Rene Haas, your host and CEO of Arm.
Today, we have a very special episode for you. I’m in Bangalore, India, joined by Ashwini Vaishnaw, the Indian government’s Minister for Railways, Information & Broadcasting and Electronics & Information Technology. Under his leadership, India’s electronics manufacturing and exports have grown notably and the country’s first domestically produced semiconductor chip was released this fall.
Minister, thanks so much for joining me.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [0:45]
Thank you.
Rene Haas [0:46]
Pleasure to have you. And you joined us today for this grand opening, which was also pretty amazing. Have you done many of these grand openings of offices across India recently?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [0:56]
Not many, but Arm is special, so I had to be here. And good thing is that you're doing two nanometer design here. So that makes it a very special occasion for me, so that's why I came here.
Rene Haas [1:10]
Yeah. So there's a lot of things I want to talk to you about. There’s some amazing things going on with Indian economic growth, the things that are going on with semiconductor initiatives in India, which has a long and rich history. But maybe I want to start, Minister, with your background, and your background is unique. You've been in the technology space, you've been in the private sector, but now you're a high-ranking official in the Indian government. So, tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got to where you are.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [1:34]
It's an interesting journey. And see, I started as an engineer. I studied electronics and communication, and during college itself, I got hooked to semiconductors. And in fact, we somehow got one chip in our college and invented – used that to invent a network printer, way back, that’s a long, long time.
Rene Haas [1:55]
And what were you programming the 8085 in?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [1:57]
That was hex.
Rene Haas [1:59]
The hex assembly? My goodness.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [2:02]
It was very, very difficult and it required so much focus, I remember.
Rene Haas [2:05]
You probably still remember some of the commands, I would imagine. I still remember some from 8080. So, you studied engineering in university…
Ashwini Vaishnaw [2:12]
Correct. Did my MTech at IIT Kanpur and during MTech, again was very fortunate to work on transformer for text-to-sound. Actually, I designed a card which was manufactured by Intel and then I had to write the entire database management system, because there was no DBMS which would take sound as a data element. So, it was very interesting and very kind of – at that point of time, probably a very unique project. Then I got into government, worked as an IAS officer, which is a challenging task in our country, managed –
Rene Haas [2:45]
And what is that – for our listeners who may not know, what is an IAS officer?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [2:51]
So I’m sure people in India would understand. Outside India, one example I can give is like managing a complete district in India, maybe having like 1.4 million people, kind of thing. Having one large city or two large cities, and many small villages. So managing that, practically every aspect of governance comes to you, so that's very interesting. Then I worked in the Prime Minister's office, and then I went to Wharton and did my MBA, studied finance there, and came back and had a good entrepreneurial and corporate journey. And our Prime Minister gave me this very big opportunity in 2019. He got me into the parliament, and gave this big responsibility.
Rene Haas [3:37]
So you were designing text-to-sound, you were working on a network printer. You got your degree, your masters, yet you moved into government. What drove that choice for you at the time?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [3:51]
A lot of things happen in our lives which are driven by the context and the society of that period. A large part of it was driven by my family. My father wished me into civil services, but I was more inclined towards technology.
Rene Haas [4:06]
And were there aspects of your engineering background that when you got into civil service that helped you? Engineers are known to be very, very logical folks. Were there aspects of it when you look back that served you well?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [4:21]
It served me very well, because engineering gives you that logical way of thinking, that problem-solving mindset comes when you do engineering training and that really helped me. In fact, in one example I can give is the ‘99 super cyclone which came on the east coast of India. At that time, I was serving in a district called Balasore. I practically went into the computers of NASA. And got a lot of good data and collected that together and could predict the path of the cyclone. So that really helped.
Rene Haas [4:52]
Yeah. The thing that I'm just so impressed with is - and we’ll talk about your role now - is that having that engineering training, both in terms of your education and doing work in the private sector, has you rather uniquely positioned to understand the needs of the marketplace.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [5:07]
It helps me understand it. It also helps me engage well with the technical world. One can understand the challenges that we would face and one can foresee the entire spectrum of the issues that you’d face.
Rene Haas [5:20]
So, tell the world that's listening here, your role now, what you do inside of Parliament for the Ministry. You've got - your title’s rather unique in terms of the areas you look after, which are quite large and broad, but tell folks a bit about what you're doing.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [5:35]
So currently I've got three responsibilities. One is electronics and IT, where we basically are focused on manufacturing, on developing solutions for digital public infrastructure, and on creating the semiconductor ecosystem in our country – that is one, and the AI piece of it, AI mission. Second is railways where we have a very large network, which is more than 150 years old. A large population uses railways, so modernizing that entire network, getting it up to speed towards today’s technologies. And third is information and broadcasting.
Rene Haas [6:13]
So let's talk about semiconductors. I started my career in the middle 1980s and at that time, Japan was overtaking the United States and having a national policy on semiconductors was extremely important. And the U.S. started a consortium back in the day to address that. And then there was a period, I think, when the Internet boomed, that semiconductors weren’t seen as so interesting anymore – national policy waned and there wasn't as much attention given to it. Now the world has changed for a myriad of things. When you think about it in your role, what are the things that come to mind in terms of how you think about semiconductors, both in terms of the importance to India as a country, but also how you think about a national policy?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [6:57]
So if you look at it, any country which wants to be a significant player in the world must have good command over certain technologies. Semiconductor is one of them, quantum is another. getting the capabilities to work on those technologies. Telecom is another. So it's very important that we have significant capabilities in these technologies. That's the way we look at semiconductor as a major technology in our entire constellation of spectrum of technologies that we are forming. We have very strong design capabilities in our country. Close to one-fifth of the design talent is here in India, globally. So, every large global semiconductor company has a good presence here.
Rene Haas [7:47]
Some of our best people working on the most advanced products for Arm are here.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [7:51]
Correct. And really advanced chips like two nanometer, three nanometer, some of the advanced nodes are being designed here. Based on this design capability, we want to now get into the manufacturing. So fab, ATMP, the capital equipment, the materials, and the finished product, which is electronics, right? This entire spectrum we are working on. So, in the case of semiconductors, we definitely want to have a good design ecosystem, further develop startups which can be – basically, which become product companies. And we want to do fabrication and manufacture of chips. We want to do ATMP. We already have ten units under construction at this point of time as we speak. Two of them are fabs and eight are ATMP units. We want to also manufacture the equipment which goes into manufacturing chips.
Rene Haas [8:43]
And, sorry to interrupt you, Ashwini, but you started in 2019 in this role. When did you start to put in place this thinking about, we need a national policy around semiconductors?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [8:53]
So our semiconductor mission was inaugurated on the first of January 2022.
Rene Haas [8:59]
Okay.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [9:00]
2021 is when our Prime Minister approved the semiconductor mission. And then first January 2022, we started the mission. And in three and a half years, we have made significant progress.
Rene Haas [9:11]
And here, relative to – here being in India – how does the government get involved relative to the private sector, the university system, to distill that mission into these partners to help build the ecosystem. How does that happen here?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [9:27]
So the mission is run by professionals, technical people, people who understand semiconductors very well. They are the ones who are running the entire mission, it’s run in a very professional and transparent manner. Our interaction is with multiple stakeholders, with the chemical, the gas manufacturers, the equipment manufacturers, the designers. In terms of universities, we have tie-ups – within the country, we are developing a very large talent pool, 278 universities we are working with.
Rene Haas [9:59]
So, 278 universities in India. And how does the government organize that effort with the universities, how does that take place?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [10:07]
So, we have a body called AICTE – All India Council for Technical Education. That's the coordinating body. Under the semiconductor mission, we have provided free-of-cost access to the world’s best EDA tools to the students studying in these universities. Basically, we would like our students to come out of the college well-prepared for the industry and also having that edge over other parts of the world.
Rene Haas [10:33]
Yeah. That's fantastic. And the vision is not just designing chips, but your vision is to go very, very broad with this.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [10:42]
Our Prime Minister gave us the mandate to develop the entire ecosystem. So, we want to manufacture chips, we want to manufacture the equipment which goes into manufacturing chips, and we want to manufacture the materials which go into manufacturing chips. So, the complete ecosystem we are working on.
Rene Haas [10:57]
Those are bold ambitions, and I think they're the right ones. When you think about the headwinds, things that make that challenging, what comes to mind?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [11:05]
When you start any industry, there certainly would be many challenges. And when we started this journey, I remember my first interactions with the semiconductor professionals on the west coast of the U.S. – I met about 45 top CEOs and CTOs – and each time my pitch used to be: “We are starting a new industry and I don’t know anything. So please help us understand what this industry is and what we should be doing.” And everybody guided us very well and I must thank each one of those 45 CEOs who helped us think through the challenges. And we meticulously looked at each and every challenge, and: “Okay, this is a problem about power supply, let's find out how do we mitigate this.” “This is a problem about a particular very high ultra-pure chemical, let's find out how to mitigate that risk.” And methodically we have been working.
Rene Haas [11:58]
So, semiconductor investment for the type that you're talking about is not a one-year thing. It's not a two-year thing. It's a decades kind of thing. How do you ensure that the momentum lasts decades, given the fact that you're in a country here in India that has elections, government leadership could change. How do you think you maintain that sort of “stick-to-it-iveness”, if you will, relative to continuing that journey?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [12:27]
By having a very large ecosystem and a very large number of stakeholders. One good thing about our country is once we take a direction, the momentum once it builds up, it remains maintained for a very long period of time. And when you have a very large ecosystem where everybody is partner in the program, then it helps in creating that sustainability.
Rene Haas [12:49]
Are there parts of the ecosystem that you think need more investment relative to the semiconductor vision?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [12:56]
I think the chemical and gas part will require a lot more attention. Because the ultra-pure chemicals which are required in manufacturing chips will require a lot more capabilities than we have.
Rene Haas [13:09]
Yeah, I think from a talent standpoint, certainly speaking for Arm, we're – not only we have a huge presence here, but some of our best people are here. I think that there's such a rich talent base of engineers here and also entrepreneurs who are here and who have moved to other parts of the world and come back – I feel like talent is not an issue, but maybe I'm not thinking about it the right way. Do you think…
Ashwini Vaishnaw [13:34]
There are two parts to this question. Basically, the talent which designs and the talent which works in the clean rooms. So, we are working on both parts of it. The design part is – that pool is already available and there's a very large number of those. But the clean room, the people who currently work in fab, that’s where we are currently focused on, so that we get the right people.
Rene Haas [13:56]
Now semiconducting, I want to come back to it, but I want to talk a little bit about India's economic growth and where that's going. It's obvious to anyone who comes here, and you and I were just remarking, looking outside this beautiful new office here, you could be anywhere in the world when you looked out at these gleaming buildings. It feels like this nation is on the cusp of some hyper-growth. Tell us a little bit about how you think about the growth engine of India.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [14:19]
So, it's a very well thought through strategy that we are executing. Our Prime Minister has given us a very clear way forward. It's basically built on four pillars. The pillar number one isinvestment in physical infrastructure as well as investment in digital and soc al infrastructure. Pillar two is about focus on manufacturing and innovation. Pillar three is inclusive growth and pillar four is simplification of so many processes and legal systems that we have. All the four pillars we are working in a very methodical way. We used to do public investment of about $30, 35 billion U.S. dollars ten years ago. Now we do about $140 billion dollars, and –
Rene Haas [15:02]
And so that’s capital investment in –
Ashwini Vaishnaw [15:05]
In railways, highways..
Rene Haas [15:08]
$140 billion dollars.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [15:09]
– Power, in building new universities, improving the suburban transportation, so many other things. The second part is focus on manufacturing and innovation. So starting from just about 300, 400 startups ten years ago, today we have more than 130,000 startups in our country and more than a hundred unicorns. We are today the third largest startup ecosystem. And Make in India, which is part of the second pillar, we are focused a lot on manufacturing practically everything. So electronics manufacturing, we have grown six times. Electronics exports, we have grown eight times. Telecom equipment, we always used to import ever since the 1950s, and now we are a major exporter of telecom equipment. Defense equipment, we used to import, now we’ve become an exporter. So, all those things are very much well-thought through part of the second pillar of manufacturing and innovation. Third is inclusive growth. We are a very diverse country, culturally, linguistically, economic growth level, all those things. So, we are very, very keen on making sure that the people at the bottom of the pyramid, they get significantly good opportunities to come up, and the economy, the entire society and the country should rise up as a good harmonious way. So many programs, for example, opening 540 million new bank accounts. And so that's huge, right? And any sector, like 130 million households getting tap water connection. 40 million houses built for the poorer sections of the society. It’s a very, very wide program, which we have taken up. Fourth is simplification, we have removed about 1,500 laws from the statute book and about 35,000 compliances from the system, and still that's a work in progress. We are still working towards simplifying the system. So, it's a very well thought through strategy. I can say with a high level of confidence that we'll continue to grow in the band of 6-8% over the next few years and then move higher in that band with very moderate inflation.
Rene Haas [17:25]
That's just amazing. And removing all those processes is somewhat music to my ears. I want to talk about AI for a bit – to what level does AI accelerate that? Both in terms of the technology, and then I'm very curious about how you in your role view using AI to enable some of the changes you're talking about.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [17:47]
India is an early adopter of AI. We are using AI in practically every sector of the economy today. We also have set up an AI mission. That mission basically does three major things. First is provide common compute facilities to our youngsters, to our startups and researchers.
Rene Haas [18:08]
So wait, what does that mean, common compute?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [18:11]
So if you look at the world, access to technology is limited to a few. So for example, in the case of semiconductors, we provided EDA tools to a very large population of students. Similarly, we are providing GPUs, 38,000 of them, to the students, the researchers, startups. So that common compute facility we created using government funds. And we are developing our LLMs, five teams are working on it. Then we have set up an AI Safety Institute, which is working in a very interesting network approach, which is developing a techno-legal solution to AI safety. We are developing many AI-based applications for our agriculture, education, healthcare, climate-related applications. So, it’s a very comprehensive program.
Rene Haas [19:00]
On the techno-legal approach towards AI, what does that mean exactly in terms of…techno-legal?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [19:08]
So we think that something as complex as AI cannot be dealt with simply by passing a law, by legislating something. It has to be solved in a more practical way. The practical way, we think, is to develop technical solutions and complement that with the legal structure. That’s the way we are thinking and – so for example, detecting a deep-fake. How do you detect a deep-fake? So, we have IIT Jodhpur working on a technical solution to detect deep-fake with a very high level of certainty. So that's an approach. And we have taken many institutions as a part of this network, rather than some of the countries or some other geographies without taking any names, I would say that they just want to legislate something and believe that the problem will be solved. The problem has to be solved in a more practical way.
Rene Haas [20:02]
Can it be solved through a sovereign cloud where you have control of the models, controls of the weights? Or is your view that the world is flat when it comes to this and these AI models cross national boundaries? And this is a global coordination that’s required around AI?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [20:21]
Absolutely, it's indeed a global coordination that we will require, because the digital world doesn’t have physical boundaries. So I think the good part of new technology will be harnessed by our corporations, by our people, by our startups. But the harmful things will have to be globally coordinated and to me, it appears that over the period of the next few years, the world will come to a level of understanding where people will sit together and look at solving this safety part in a more coordinated way.
Rene Haas [20:55]
Are you an “AI for good” – are you a bear or a bull when it comes to the benefits of AI?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [21:02]
I believe that technology does bring a lot of good things to the society, it can help us solve population-scale problems. For example, one of the applications we have is aimed at detecting tuberculosis. And it’s very effective.
Rene Haas [21:16]
Absolutely.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [21:17]
Another one that we are working on is improving the productivity of our agriculture. And the results are phenomenal. So, I'm very practical, very rational on this topic. I would say that, let’s harness the benefits and let’s keep our society safe from the harms.
Rene Haas [21:32]
Are you surprised at how fast it has moved in terms of, we had our ChatGPT moment a couple years ago and the advancement relative to whether it's video, whether it’s voice, queries… Are you surprised at how fast it’s moved?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [21:50]
I think the trend is very clear. If you look at a few decades ago, the technology cycle used to be a few years. Then it shrunk to a couple of years, three years. Then it shrunk to like one year you have a totally new technology. So, the technology cycles have really, really shrunk in the past, so one can really anticipate that the growth which is seen today will continue.
Rene Haas [22:13]
A lot of talk about “it's moving so fast and then there’s going to be a wave of jobs that are just going to get eliminated”. And then there are folks who say with every technological advancement, there's always jobs that go away, but there are more jobs that are created as a result. And then folks say, “well, no, this time it’s different because AI can think, AI can do the kind of jobs that certain trained white-collar workers could have done. Is it something at the government level here in India, it’s talked about and thought about, I’m wondering?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [22:43]
We definitely are concerned about the change which is happening in the economy because of AI and the potential disruptions in employment. Yes, that's a major point. And we think that the solution to that is to upskill our people very rapidly. We think that, for example, the large number of students that we are training in 5G technologies and the large number of people that we are training in semiconductors, that same scale we must train our people in AI, both in the use, as well as in development. In fact, we have taken up a program for a million technical persons to be trained in AI-related technologies.
Rene Haas [23:25]
And what would be examples of those AI?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [23:29]
Multiple things. At a very basic level, making sure that the data annotation capabilities are there. At a mid-level, making sure that the applications can be created in India, for the world. And at a bigger level, on the research side.
Rene Haas [23:45]
Yeah. At Arm, and I think really across semiconductor companies, we're seeing productivity gains from AI, there's no doubt about it. But still finding very skilled engineers to do complex work around chip design, particularly some of the most complex chips in the world, we still see a need for a lot of engineers, as evidenced by all the growth here. Do you have a viewpoint on that, when you think about the semiconductor world, is AI – do jobs start going away in semis with AI?
Ashwini Vaishnaw [24:14]
I think the change will be there, I think the change will bring many good aspects, and there will be some parts of it which will require a lot of adjustment. What’s your view on this? Because you see the entire world from your perch.
Rene Haas [24:27]
Well, you know, I view AI as sort of this Star Trek thing that I did not think in my lifetime I would be able to work on it, from the perspective of, “can machines think and solve problems?” I think so long as ideas can be created to create new things, then I'm not so worried about where jobs go. It gets interesting though, when the AI gets smart enough to figure out, “here's the next thing you should do relative to developing a product or solving a problem.” Then I think it gets interesting. I am very much “AI for good,” as you are as well. I think healthcare is the killer app. When you look at the amount of time it takes to do a drug trial or genomic research, having that accelerated to an incredible level is pretty, pretty amazing. What the world looks like in 50 years? That's a great question. I would have thought that would have been a question years ago, we would have said, “well, it’ll kind of look the way it does today.” I think that time has shrunk. I think in 10 to 20 years, it’s going to be a very fascinating world. But chips will be at the heart of it, there's no doubt about it. So, what you guys are doing here in terms of your policy is the right one.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [25:41]
What’s the change in the semiconductor industry that you think – what’s the trend that you see where a country like us where we are starting a new industry, we should be thinking about?
Rene Haas [25:53]
Yeah, so in India, I think, there's so much potential to create the world’s next great geography for everything you’ve talked about, because you have access to a gigantic talent pool, you have access to resources, even rare earth-type minerals you have huge access to. So there's no reason over time, India cannot become a great dominant player in terms of the whole vertical infrastructure, which is why I find what your policies are behind to be so exciting, and it’s so fascinating, you’ve gone off and had these discussions with all the different CEOs, you said, on the West Coast. To be sitting here with a minister who can talk about Synopsys and Cadence EDA tools and understand where those are, that’s a huge jump because when it starts at the top, relative to an understanding of the details, is a very significant thing. So, I'm very excited by it. And when I come here to our office in Bangalore and I see the energy level and the passion of people to create and invent, like you said, there’s an entrepreneurial spirit here that’s so rich, I think there's no ceiling for what India could do in this space. So, I think it's just amazing. Ashwini, thank you so much. It was wonderful chatting with you and thank you again for joining us today on Tech Unheard and our grand opening in our new office.
Ashwini Vaishnaw [27:14]
Thank you, Rene. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Rene Haas [27:15]
My pleasure.
Thanks for listening to this month's episode of Tech Unheard. We'll be back next month for another look behind the boardroom door. To be sure you don't miss new episodes, follow Tech Unheard wherever you get your podcasts. Until then, Tech Unheard is a custom podcast series from Arm and National Public Media. And I'm Arm CEO, Rene Haas. Thanks for listening to Tech Unheard.
Credits [27:48]
Arm Tech Unheard is a custom podcast series from Arm and National Public Media.
Executive producers Erica Osher and Shannon Boerner. Project manager Colin Harden. Creative lead producer Isabel Robertson. Editors Andrew Meriwether and Kelly Drake. Composer Aaron Levison. Arm production contributors include Ami Badani, Claudia Brandon, Simon Jared, Jonathan Armstrong, Ben Webdell, Sofia McKenzie, Kristen Ray, and Saumal Shah. Tech Unheard is hosted by Arm Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas.