NEW DELHI, Oct 18: Digital credit, fast mobile data and large language models (LLMs) are among some of the initiatives that India has taken in its digital-led growth story, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Saturday.
He also showed a palm-sized model of a home-grown semiconductor wafer that has potential to disrupt global market leaders in this industry. Most importantly, Vaishnaw said data sovereignty must stay geographically within India.
“Data is the new oil,” he said. “Data centres are the new refineries. The new economy which is taking shape in today’s economy. We must take control of our destiny and make sure that the talent we have in our country finds opportunities here,” the Union IT Minister said. India is using the world’s latest tools to make chips which very few have, he added.
“We have a very significant talent base that has given us a unique strength. Already 20 per cent of our design engineers, global design engineering talent is in India. And today we are designing chips of 2 nanometers in our country,” he said. “Earlier it used to be 5 nanometers, 7 nanometers. Now 2 nanometer chips are here; they are the most complex of chips, the smallest. Those are now designed in India,” he said.
He then took out a palm-sized semiconductor wafer to illustrate his explanation of a complex subject. “This is a very complex industry because the magnitude and dimensions at which we have to work and the complexity are really, really difficult. So, a chip can be extremely small, you can’t even see it with a microscope. It’s 10,000 times smaller than human hair,” Vaishnaw said.
He said that kind of work in fabricating a chip is like building an entire city on a small little wafer. “This is a wafer,” the Union Minister said, holding the home-grown chip. “On this, building a complete city which will have its own plumbing, its own heating, its own electrical network, its own circuits and huge, it’s a very, very complex thing,” he added.
The Union Minister cited what somebody told him happened when the power supply went off for five minutes, for example. “It was a loss of $200 million. That kind of complexity is there and the chemicals and gases which are used are extremely pure, ultra-pure chemicals and gases, 500-plus chemical parts per billion purity,” Vaishnaw added.
(Manas Dasgupta)
