Homegrown consumer electronics company Micromax has entered into a joint venture with Taiwan-based Phison to design and manufacture storage chips or solid-state drives (SSDs) in the country.
The joint venture will be majority-owned by Micromax, holding a 55% stake, while Phison will hold the remaining 45%.
“There is a need for India to become independent in storage. Currently, India lacks storage chip design capabilities, although we excel in designing for others. The idea with this JV is to enable the country to design its own storage solutions.” Rahul Sharma, co-founder of Micromax Informatics,” told FE.
“With this venture, we aim to bring down the cost of GPU by one-tenth by bringing the lowest per token cost in the world. This will help us in disrupting the AI landscape not only in India but also in specific agreed-upon regions,” Sharma added.
MiPhi plans to provide custom-designed NAND storage solutions for applications in AI, enterprise, and automotive sectors.
According to Sharma, one of MiPhi’s product is aiDAPTIV, which can be used to train AI models even with 400 billion tokens and with only 8 GPUs. The same otherwise would have required 70-80 GPUs and huge costs.
“By virtue of our chip, one server can train a ChatGPT. Nobody has something like this. This is the power of design,” Sharma said.
The company will utilise its Noida plant to manufacture the chips. Presently, it is in talks with many big companies to secure an order book and will start with the commercial shipments next year onwards.
When asked what kind of investments Micromax is putting into it, Sharma said, “already $250 million (around `2,000 crore) has been invested by Phison on one memory product. For Micromax, all the infrastructure, all the know-how and whatever we are going to do, that all will be contributed by us.”
On hiring, Sharma said, “The plan is to expand the team size to 1,000 people largely on chip design front.” Phison is currently training the manpower here of MiPhi in India.
KS Pua, CEO of Phison said, “By uniting Micromax’s local market understanding with Phison’s world-class storage technologies, we are well-positioned to create impactful solutions across SMBs, automotive, IoT, AI, enterprise workloads, and beyond.”
As part of the semiconductor incentive scheme, one of the focus areas for the government is also on the chip design space. Currently, the government is supporting startups in the chip design space. One of the focus of the government, is to enable generation of intellectual property (IPs) in India on chip design.
Once the scheme is opened for larger chip design companies, Sharma said, “MiPhi is open to exploring participating in the chip design scheme.”