Sanjay Kumar of Arab News spoke to me about the geopolitical implications of India joining the Pax Silica grouping. I am reproducing my answers to his questions below.
You can read Sanjay’s article on this topic here
Q1: Why does this alliance matter?
Pax Silica is a technology alliance for the AI age, spanning the entire stack from critical minerals and energy to chips, compute, AI infrastructure, and digital networks. No single country can secure this pipeline alone. The only viable path is coordinated action among trusted partners. That is what Pax Silica aims to do, but the fact sheet is currently still heavy on announcements and light on executable policy.
In an earlier blog, I predicted that India would eventually join Pax Silica once the trade deal was signed.
Q2: How does joining Pax Silica benefit India or serve its ambition to become a global AI player?
India is already structurally inside the tent—nearly every top-25 fabless company has a chip design centre here, and roughly 20 per cent of the world’s chip design talent is Indian. The chips powering Pax Silica are already being designed in Bengaluru.
A diplomatic summit cannot firewall that reality. But formal membership gives India a seat at the table where the rules of the AI-age technology order are being written. Indian firms are positioned to be the global deployment engine for enterprise AI. Pax Silica membership could help them get preferential access to compute, models, and markets.
Q3: What role can India play in this alliance?
India has a role to play across the entire stack:
- chip design, where it is already indispensable, with 30,000 engineers designing about 3,000 chips annually
- manufacturing and assembly, with eight OSAT plants, one CMOS fab, and one compound semiconductor fab under construction
- Enterprise AI integration, where Indian software firms have potential as a global deployment engine
- market scale, as one of the largest AI deployment markets in the world
- critical minerals, with growing rare earth processing and recycling capacity, and
- talent supply, at a time when every Pax Silica member faces engineering shortfalls.