AI disruption in IT industry: Minister Vaishnaw calls for accelerating upskilling and reskilling workforce

The minister said the country had set a target of training 85,000 semiconductor engineers over 10 years, but has already trained about 67,000 engineers.

Bengaluru: As Artificial Intelligence(AI) is progressing, there is a major change that is coming in the entire software industry- both disruption and opportunity. This is the time when the industry, academia and government should fully synchronise and make sure that students and employees are undergoing upskilling and reskilling, Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said on Saturday.

Speaking at the Qualcomm Technologies event in Bengaluru, Vaishnaw said he has requested the IT industry to come up with the course curriculum, the way they did in the semiconductor industry. He said the government will be willing to put in a huge amount of effort to make sure that students get the right skills and the talent (the existing workforce) gets the right opportunity to upskill.

The minister's call for accelerating upskilling comes at a time when the IT industry is witnessing major disruptions due to AI. A couple of days ago, AI startup Anthropic's new AI tool has raised concerns among analysts and they said there is more pain ahead for Indian IT.

Qualcomm Technologies on Saturday announced the successful tape-out of its 2nm semiconductor design, and Vaishnaw said the India Semiconductor Mission 2.0 will focus on advanced manufacturing with a roadmap to achieve a 2-nanometre chip that "should also be fabbed in India," he said.

By 2035, India aims to be among the top semiconductor nations globally. In 2021, the India Semiconductor Mission 1.0 was announced. As of December 2025, 10 projects with a total investment of Rs 1.60 lakh crore have been approved across 6 states. These include silicon fabrication units, silicon carbide fabs, advanced and memory packaging facilities, and specialised assembly and testing infrastructure.

The minister said we will soon have the Semicon 2.0 policy, and focus will be on designing as the proposed priority, equipment and materials as the next priority, followed by talent to a much deeper level. "Getting more fabs and ATMP (Assembly, test, marking and packaging) units will also be part of the work, and making sure that our path to 7- nanometre, from the current 28-nanometre, will be part of the policy, which should be finally completed within next few months, and it will be another great chapter in the journey," he said.

He also said the country had set a target of training 85,000 semiconductor engineers over 10 years, but has already trained about 67,000 engineers. This was due to the programmes spanning 315 universities and colleges.

Over Rs 10,300 crore has been allocated over five years for IndiaAI Mission with 38,000 GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) deployed. Vaishnaw also said that very soon, we should be adding about 50,000 more GPUs.

Talking about data centres, the minister said they are going to be a major growth journey in the coming years. “So far, we have committed investments of $70 billion, and if we add the other announcements, it's about $90 billion. I expect that in the coming months, this number will go beyond $200 billion,” he said.

The entire world is looking at us with hope because of the kind of talent that we have in our country. We are a country which respects IP, and that believes in co-creating and co-developing, he added.