Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today announced that it will spend about $400 million to open a new chip research and engineering hub in India.

The facility is set be located in the city of Bangalore, a major tech hub. It will be AMD’s largest chip design center with about 3,000 engineers, 500,000 square feet of space and “extensive” lab facilities. The chipmaker plans to open the center by the end of the year. 

AMD operates as a fabless semiconductor company, meaning it designs chips and relies on external manufacturers to make them. The company’s engineers focus almost exclusively on processor design tasks, software development and related work. It spun off its chip manufacturing operation in 2009, forming the company now known as GlobalFoundries Inc. in the process. 

The 3,000 engineers who are set to work at AMD’s new Bangalore hub will expand its total headcount in India to more than 9,000 employees. Those employees work in 10 offices across five different cities: Bangalore, Delhi, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Mumbai. AMD opened its first office in India more than 20 years ago.

“From a handful of employees in 2001 to more than 6,500 employees today, AMD has grown its India footprint based on the strong foundation established by our local leadership and the highly skilled talent pool,” said Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster.

The company is launching its push to hire 3,000 engineers in Bangalore less than two years after another major headcount expansion. It gained about 4,800 employees last February when it completed its acquisition of Xilinx Inc. for $50 billion. Xilinx, a fellow fabless chipmaker, developed processors called FPGAs that can be configured to perform one specific computing task highly efficiently.

AMD is not the only major chipmaker expanding its presence in India. Earlier this year, memory supplier Micron Inc. announced plans to build two new chip plants in the state of Gujarat at a cost of up to $2.85 billion. 

Micron expects the first plant to come online in late 2024. It will include 500,000 square feet of cleanroom space dedicated to assembling and testing memory chips. Construction of the second facility, which Micron said will be “similar in scale” to the first, is set to begin during the second half of the decade.

The same month the chipmaker announced the investment, Applied Materials Inc. revealed plans to build a $400 million engineering hub in Bangalore. Applied Materials makes semiconductor manufacturing equipment that is used by Micron and many other chipmakers. At least 500 engineers will work at the company’s new facility in Bangalore once it becomes fully operational. 

Image: AMD