In Qualcomm’s efforts to create its next-generation 2-nanometer processor node, India’s engineering talent has emerged as a key pillar, supporting both design and advanced R&D activities that will feed into commercial launches anticipated in the upcoming year.
This is in line with New Delhi’s aspirations in the semiconductor and artificial intelligence sectors, where multinational companies like Qualcomm are increasingly utilizing India not only as a market but also as a center for development and innovation.
The president of Qualcomm India, Savi Soin, claims that work on 2nm chips is being done in several different parts of the world, with India playing a key role because of the company’s highest concentration of engineers worldwide.
Qualcomm can assign complicated front-end and IP design jobs to local teams while coordinating architecture and verification throughout its worldwide network thanks to this concentration of high-end design capability in India.
Qualcomm’s competitiveness in high-end and flagship devices will be enhanced by the impending 2nm system-on-a-chip (SoC), which is expected to provide improved energy efficiency and higher processing performance for future smartphone platforms.
According to Qualcomm’s roadmap, these enhancements will be especially important for AI workloads, sophisticated camera pipelines, connectivity processing, and long-term gaming performance in high-end phones.
Through its long-standing foundry cooperation with Taiwan Semiconductor manufacture Company (TSMC), which is anticipated to start large-scale 2nm manufacture in 2026, Qualcomm plans to produce its 2nm chipset in significant quantities.
Through this fabless-foundry partnership, Qualcomm’s design teams in India are able to optimize SoC layouts and power-performance trade-offs for the 2nm node by focusing on TSMC’s advanced process design kits (PDKs) and design guidelines.
With Taiwanese rival MediaTek collaborating with TSMC to start producing its own 2nm CPUs in large quantities by late 2026, competition at this cutting edge is getting fiercer. The simultaneous ramp-up by Qualcomm and MediaTek suggests that 2nm will soon emerge as a major differentiator in the flagship Android ecosystem, particularly for modem-integrated SoCs and power-efficient AI.
Approximately one-third of smartphone SoCs are anticipated to be manufactured on 3nm and 2nm nodes by 2026, according to market analysis from Hong Kong-based Counterpoint analysis.
In order to support AI inference, sophisticated imaging, and longer battery life in increasingly small devices, increased compute performance, improved energy efficiency, and improved thermal properties are the main drivers that have been identified.
Due to pricing structures and early capacity limitations at top foundries, 2nm chipsets are expected to be mostly limited to flagship and high-end smartphones over the first two to three years of deployment.
These sophisticated nodes will eventually cascade into upper-mid segment devices as yields rise and production expands, increasing their influence on the larger handset market.
Qualcomm has been expanding its design and R&D presence in India, as demonstrated by the semiconductor design center that was opened in Chennai in March of last year.
This facility contributes to the company’s broader 5G and Wi-Fi technology roadmap while supporting international research in next-generation mobile and computing solutions, including Snapdragon platforms and AI-centric capabilities.
The corporation has demonstrated its long-term commitment to creating intellectual property outside of India by investing approximately ₹180 crore in the Chennai design center. Teams here are working on IP creation that feeds into other product lines in addition to core smartphone SoCs, enhancing Qualcomm’s capacity to localize solutions and reduce development cycles.
Next-generation fixed wireless access (FWA), Wi-Fi 8, novel compute devices, inexpensive 5G phone platforms, hearables, and AR/VR-style spectacles are just a few of the varied projects that India-based engineering organizations are now working on. This breadth shows that India is handling complicated system design and protocol innovation spanning connection and edge-compute domains, rather than being limited to low-end work.
Savi Soin highlights that Qualcomm already has intellectual property created in India, supported by what he refers to as top-notch teams who are spearheading important facets of the nation’s chip development. India constantly emerges as one of the most significant centers from a development standpoint. The organization employs a talent-driven allocation method, mapping crucial design duties to areas where the strongest expertise resides.
This growing presence aligns with the Government of India’s Make in India and more general semiconductor initiatives, which aim to draw innovative design, research and development, and ultimately production into the local ecosystem.
As a result, Qualcomm’s design center approach supports both local capability development in advanced chip design and AI platforms as well as its own global product pipeline, which includes the 2nm SoC.
After speaking with Cristiano Amon, the president and CEO of Qualcomm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has officially recognized and supported the company’s contribution in India’s semiconductor and artificial intelligence initiatives.
Such high-level messaging is likely to increase cooperative efforts and policy backing, further integrating India into Qualcomm’s global technology roadmap and bolstering the nation’s standing in the advanced semiconductor value chain.
