As Google announced its plans to manufacture Pixel smartphones in India, communications and IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw has asked the company to also start manufacturing the Tensor chipset in the country within the next three years. Google Tensor is the custom-built chip that goes into Pixel smartphones to perform advanced tasks.
Besides bringing its chipset manufacturing in the country, Vaishnaw also asked Google to bring its premium foldable Pixel phone to India and to establish their supply chain partners here to strengthen the components ecosystem.
“It’s great to see Google join the ‘Make in India’ initiative and further strengthen India’s growth story with their plans to locally manufacture Pixel smartphones in the country,” Vaishnaw told reporters on the sidelines of the Google for India event.
Vaishnaw said, “We have asked Google to completely design and manufacture Tensor chipsets in India”.
The government’s push to attract chip design and manufacturing in India is critical at a time when major semiconductor companies are looking at geographies to establish their ecosystem in a bid to move away from China.
In India, Google is currently leveraging its research lab in Bengaluru for designing its Tensor chipset. In its latest series of smartphones – Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro, the company has used Google Tensor G3, its fastest, most efficient, and most secure chip yet.
Vaishnaw said that the government is simultaneously working to grow the component manufacturing ecosystem in the country, and it will pick pace in the next one year.
India currently does close to $44 billion worth smartphone manufacturing, and the exports of mobile phones is at $11 billion. Lately, Google’s competitor Apple, which has been manufacturing smartphones in the country for some years now, for the first time made its latest iPhone 15 available in India at par with other countries.
The minister also applauded Google’s announcements to facilitate sachet loans and credit via unified payment interface (UPI) to merchants, Vaishnaw said, “Digital credit in the next two years will be a huge success, just like we had with digital payments in India.”
“Digitally-powered democratisation of credit and commerce will especially boost the growth of small businesses which are the backbone of the economy,” Vaishnaw added.
The thinking within the government is that once there is a system available with the banks, which provides all the information regarding the transaction history of an individual, credit history, background check, etc, it will make it easy for them to lend.
