India Used to Be the Back Office. Now It Is the Engineering Core.
For most of the semiconductor industry's history, the mental model for India's role was clear and limited. Design the chip in Silicon Valley or Eindhoven or Hsinchu. Manufacture it in Taiwan or South Korea. And if you needed cheap, competent engineers to do the verification work, the documentation, the testing — send that to India.
That model has not just evolved. It has been inverted.
Richard Bergman, Global Business Head for Semiconductor at Quest Global — one of the world's largest engineering services firms — made the shift explicit in a recent interview with EnterpriseStory. India, he said, is now where 80 to 90 per cent of Quest Global's global semiconductor engineering resources are located. Not the support work. Not the documentation. The engineering — the chip architecture, the design, the verification, the physical design, the system-on-chip development — that underpins Quest Global's semiconductor business for customers across North America, Europe, and globally.
More pointedly: India is no longer viewed as a cost-effective talent destination. It is, as Bergman described it, a strategic centre that enables global semiconductor companies to scale engineering operations and accelerate product development. The difference between those two framings — cost centre versus strategic centre — is not semantic. It is the difference between a vendor relationship and a dependency relationship. And for Quest Global, the dependency runs in the direction of India.
The Industry Bergman Is Describing as Its "Glory Days"
The context for Quest Global's India bet is a global semiconductor market that is experiencing a demand surge without precedent in its history.
The global semiconductor market was valued at approximately $500 billion in 2023. Projections now point toward a market approaching or exceeding $1 trillion over the coming decade, driven primarily by artificial intelligence workloads that require more advanced processors, more specialised memory, and more complex chip architectures than any prior generation of computing.
Bergman is explicit about what this moment represents for the industry:
The generative AI wave that began with ChatGPT's launch in late 2022 accelerated this trajectory dramatically. Every major AI model — every large language model, every image generation system, every AI inference engine running in a data centre — runs on chips. The demand for those chips has created a cascade of investment across the entire semiconductor value chain: from foundry capacity and advanced packaging to chip design, verification, testing, and the engineering services that support all of it.
At the same time, governments worldwide have recognised semiconductors as strategic infrastructure. The US CHIPS Act, the EU Chips Act, Japan's semiconductor subsidies, and India's own Semiconductor Mission have collectively created a policy environment that is simultaneously expanding the addressable market for semiconductor engineering services and making the supply chain resilience question central to national strategy.
Quest Global's positioning — with 80 to 90 per cent of its semiconductor engineering in India, serving customers who need to scale chip development capabilities faster than any internal team can support — is an explicit bet on being the engineering services partner of choice for companies navigating exactly this environment.
What India Has Actually Built to Deserve This Position
Quest Global's concentration of semiconductor talent in India is not an arbitrary choice. It reflects a decade of deliberate ecosystem development that has positioned India as, in Bergman's words, an irreplaceable partner for global chip companies.
The talent story is the foundation. India produces approximately 1.5 million engineering graduates per year — the largest pipeline of technically trained manpower in the world at the required scale. The semiconductor ecosystem has developed specific depth in chip design, VLSI engineering, embedded systems, firmware development, and verification — the skills that are most in demand as the AI chip wave drives complexity upward.
Quest Global formalised its commitment to this ecosystem with its April 2026 acquisition of BITSILICA, a specialised semiconductor engineering firm with capabilities in IP and subsystem design, design verification, and physical design for SoC applications. The acquisition was explicitly framed as strengthening Quest Global's semiconductor portfolio — and the fact that BITSILICA's capabilities are deeply India-based further concentrates the engineering depth that Bergman is describing.
The infrastructure story is equally important. India's semiconductor position is no longer just about design talent. The country is building physical manufacturing capability at a pace that has surprised even optimistic observers.
The Tata Electronics mega-fab in Dholera, Gujarat — developed in partnership with Taiwan's Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation — has initiated high-volume trial runs using 300mm wafers as of January 2026. The facility targets production of chips at 28nm technology nodes, crucial for automotive, mobile, and AI applications, with commercial production anticipated in late 2026. Micron Technology's $2.75 billion assembly and test plant in Sanand, Gujarat, has begun shipping Made in India memory modules. Tata Electronics' assembly and test facility in Jagiroad, Assam, is designed to produce 48 million chips daily.
India also inaugurated its first centres for advanced 3-nanometer chip design in Noida and Bengaluru in 2025 — placing it at the frontier of advanced chip innovation, not merely in the trailing edge of mature node production. The IIT Madras-developed Shakti processor, based on the RISC-V architecture, represents India's indigenous chip design capability entering a phase of tangible output rather than research ambition.
The India Semiconductor Mission, announced on January 15, 2025, by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, backs this physical build-out with a ₹76,000 crore investment over six years — a $20 billion commitment to transforming India into a global hub for chip design and manufacturing. According to KPMG's report launched at the World Economic Forum in January 2026, India is on track to join the top five global semiconductor hubs by 2030.
The "China Plus One" Dividend — and Why Quest Global Is Positioned to Capture It
The geopolitical dimension of India's semiconductor rise is not incidental to Quest Global's strategy. It is structural.
The dominant narrative in global semiconductor supply chain reconfiguration is "China plus one" — the drive by major technology companies, semiconductor firms, and the governments that depend on them to diversify away from excessive concentration of chip manufacturing capacity in Taiwan and advanced packaging in China. India's combination of democratic governance, English-speaking technical talent, and active government support for semiconductor investment makes it the most credible large-scale beneficiary of that diversification trend.
For engineering services companies like Quest Global, the China plus one dynamic creates a specific opportunity: global semiconductor companies that are expanding engineering operations in India need a partner who already has the talent, the infrastructure, the processes, and the customer relationships to scale rapidly. Quest Global, with 80 to 90 per cent of its semiconductor engineering already in India, is not building toward that position. It is already in it.
The investment flows confirm the trajectory. AI infrastructure investment in India has surpassed $70 billion in committed capital, with projections reaching $150 billion ahead of the AI Impact Summit. Every AI data centre that gets built in India requires chips. Every chip requires chip design. Every chip design requires engineering services. The chain connects directly from India's AI investment boom to Quest Global's semiconductor engineering capacity.
The Shift From Cost Centre to Strategic Centre — and Why It Changes Everything
The most consequential aspect of Bergman's framing is not the 80 to 90 per cent figure. It is the language shift from "cost-effective talent destination" to "strategic centre."
For decades, the value proposition of offshore engineering services in India was fundamentally cost arbitrage — the same work, done by equally capable engineers, at lower labour costs than in the US or Europe. That model worked, but it created a ceiling. A cost centre is always replaceable by a cheaper cost centre. Strategic centres are not replaceable by price.
The transition from cost to strategy happens when the talent pool develops not just execution capability but innovation capability — when Indian semiconductor engineers are not following specifications generated elsewhere but are generating specifications, leading architecture decisions, and producing IP that global companies cannot source at equivalent quality anywhere else.
Bergman's description of India as the place where Quest Global concentrates its semiconductor engineering — not its semiconductor support work, its semiconductor engineering — suggests that transition has happened or is happening at Quest Global's scale. The 80 to 90 per cent figure is not a cost structure optimisation. It is a capability concentration.
For India's semiconductor ecosystem, the implications extend well beyond Quest Global. When a global engineering services firm of Quest Global's scale concentrates that proportion of its strategic semiconductor capability in India, it signals to every other major semiconductor company, every global chip design house, and every government thinking about semiconductor supply chain resilience that India is not an option they are evaluating. It is a decision they need to explain if they are not making it.
KPMG's Davos 2026 framing is the right one: India has shifted from emerging to pivotal. In semiconductors, that shift is not coming. In Quest Global's global engineering footprint, it has already arrived.
What the "Glory Days" Mean for India's Engineering Workforce
The demand surge Bergman describes has a direct and immediate consequence for the Indian engineers who are producing the work: the most significant upgrading of semiconductor engineering roles, compensation, and capability that India's technology sector has seen.
As AI drives demand for more complex chips — heterogeneous architectures, chiplet designs, advanced packaging, specialised AI accelerators — the engineering complexity of the work being done in India rises proportionally. This is not maintenance engineering or legacy system support. It is frontier engineering, working on the chips that will define the next generation of AI infrastructure.
The India Semiconductor Mission's goal of building at least two semiconductor fabrication plants and multiple specialised design facilities by 2028 creates an additional dimension of opportunity: the transition of Indian semiconductor talent from design services into manufacturing engineering, process engineering, and the full stack of capabilities required to run a world-class fabrication facility.
Quest Global's concentration of its semiconductor engineering in India is, from this perspective, both a reflection of and a contribution to that trajectory. Companies that build strategic engineering centres in India, rather than cost centres, attract different talent, develop different capabilities, and produce different outcomes — for themselves and for the ecosystem around them.
The semiconductor industry's glory days, as Bergman calls them, are not just good news for chipmakers and AI companies. They are good news for the engineers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, and Noida who are doing the engineering that is making those glory days possible.
