In recent years, major US-based cloud companies have initiated projects to develop chips in-house. Besides outsourcing to external IC design houses, internal demand for semiconductor talent is also increasing. Many related job openings have been posted for their headquarters, in India, and Taiwan. India has become a recruiting hotspot for Microsoft, Google, and Meta.
Compared to Amazon and Google, which have been developing chips for many years, Microsoft and Meta are relatively late entries into the field. The recent recruitment plans of both companies seek software talent related to their core businesses and include numerous job openings related to chips.
Microsoft
In November 2023, Microsoft announced its first two in-house developed chips: the AI chip Azure Maia (first version titled the Maia 100) and the general-purpose computing Azure Cobalt CPU (first version titled the Cobalt 100), both designed to support cloud server computing.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella mentioned that the Maia chip uses the 5nm process and features technologies like the latest packaging technology, ultra-high-bandwidth networking design, and innovative cooling techniques. All designs are optimized through collaboration with algorithms. Microsoft has also deepened its partnership with NVIDIA and AMD, providing cloud computing power supported by both companies.
On its recruitment website, Microsoft has posted over a hundred job openings related to Microsoft Silicon (chips), cloud hardware, infrastructure engineering, cloud AI, and advanced systems engineering.
Among the 60-plus job openings specific to Taiwan, roles include software engineering, cloud solution architecture, cloud storage and memory, AI hardware systems, manufacturing quality management, and jobs related to Surface devices. There is also a unique position related to the operation of underwater network systems.
In early February, Nadella visited places in India such as Bangalore and Mumbai, hoping to recruit India’s AI talents in India. He also declared to provide AI empowerment opportunities for two million Indians by 2025.
Google and Meta
Around the same time, Google announced that it was transferring the production of the Pixel smartphone to India. Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind, visited India in early February to speak and recruit talents.
As for Meta, it revealed its AI chip project, the MTIA (Meta Training and Inference Accelerator), in May 2023, which uses TSMC’s 7nm processes. It also mentioned that the first generation of MTIA has been used for internal workloads since 2020.
Meta also mentioned that while the growth rate for chip computing power is rapidly increasing, progress in memory and interconnect bandwidth technologies has been rather slow, leading to extended workload execution times and challenges to chip R&D.
Recently, Meta posted numerous job openings related to chip R&D, covering sectors such as hardware system engineering, chip packaging, embedded software and firmware, ASIC engineering, SoC architecture, and more.
Among these, ASIC positions are predominantly in California, US, and Bangalore, India. There are fewer new job openings in Taiwan than in India, with opportunities in server system management, hardware engineering, and supply chain management.