New Delhi [India], February 23 (ANI): Sampige Semiconductors Private Limited, founded by semiconductor entrepreneur Parag Naik, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with BharatGen Technology Foundation to advance India's sovereign AI ecosystem through co-development of India-centric AI semiconductor chipsets, hardware-aware models, and a unified software stack under the Make in India framework.

The MoU was signed in the presence of Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, Dr Ajay Kumar Sood, and Dr Parvinder Maini, Scientific Secretary at the Office of PSA. Also present were Parag Naik, CEO of Sampige Semiconductor, Rishi Bal, CEO of BharatGen Technology Foundation, Prof. Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Founding Board member, BharatGen and Institute Chair Professor, Dept of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, apart from Bharatgen consortium members Prof. Priyesh Shukla from IIIT Hyderabad, and Vice President of Bharatgen, Pankaj Singh.

With a focus on building India's sovereign Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure, the partnership will work on co-developing next-generation AI semiconductor chipsets, energy-efficient hardware, hardware-optimised India-centric foundational models, and a unified AI software stack.

Recognizing AI as a strategic national capability, the two organizations have joined forces to reduce India's dependence on foreign AI infrastructure and to build a secure, trusted, and locally-rooted AI ecosystem. The collaboration is fully aligned with the Government of India's Make in India initiative.

The MoU, outlines a broad scope of collaboration spanning optimized hardware design, software stack development, and AI model research with a particular emphasis on affordability, linguistic inclusion, and real-world impact across sectors critical to India's growth.

Under the MoU, the two parties will work together on the development of AI semiconductor chipsets, and compute infrastructure tailored to Indian use cases, energy-efficient hardware architectures, unified software stack, compilers, and kernel orchestration, and hardware-aware AI models and India-centric foundational AI models.

By aligning chip design with large-scale multilingual model development, the collaboration aims to improve performance-per-watt, lower inference costs, and enable scalable AI deployment across edge, and cloud environments.

The collaboration will address societal needs across agriculture, healthcare, telecom, mobile and edge devices, and digital public infrastructure sectors where affordable and localized AI can have transformative impact. The low-cost solutions enable access to a broader population in India and several other countries in demand of AI compute across the global south.

Speaking on the partnership, Parag Naik, CEO and Co-founder of Sampige Semiconductors, said, 'India needs to own its AI stack from silicon to model. Our partnership with BharatGen is a foundational step in making that vision a reality. Together, we will build AI infrastructure that is sovereign, secure, scalable, and built for India's unique needs.'

Naik is best known for his earlier wireless semiconductor venture Saankhya Labs that launched one of India's first fabless chips. In recognition for his pioneering 'Designed in India' semiconductor innovations for the telecom, satcom and broadcasting markets such as D2M, Parag Naik was awarded the Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Award for Excellence in Telecom in 2025.

Rishi Bal, CEO of BharatGen Technology Foundation, said, 'BharatGen exists to ensure that AI serves India, its languages, its communities, and its development priorities. This MoU with Sampige brings us closer to a future where India's AI capabilities are homegrown, resilient, and world-class.'

Prof Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Founding Board member of BharatGen and Institute Chair Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, added, 'Serving a population of 1.4 billion needs the large scale sovereign model building and inference tasks at BharatGen to facilitate innovations in the infra layer.'

BharatGen Technology Foundation is a Mumbai-based non-profit technology foundation housed at IIT Bombay, dedicated to developing India's Sovereign AI Foundation models, research infrastructure, and open ecosystems that reflect the nation's linguistic diversity and socio-economic realities. As India's sovereign initiative, it builds inclusive AI across 22+ languages by integrating text, speech, and document vision to create robust solutions that meet the country's real-world needs. Led by IIT Bombay, it brings together a consortium of India's top academic institutions IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad, IIT Mandi, IIM Indore and IIIT Delhi to collectively push the boundaries of generative AI and build a thriving, India-centric AI ecosystem.

Sampige Semiconductors Private Limited is a Bengaluru-based semiconductor startup focused on designing chipsets tailored for Indian and other emerging market requirements. Aiming to address the Make in India vision, Sampige is committed to building indigenous, secure, and high-performance semiconductor solutions. (ANI)