HCLTech opens two Karnataka centres to help Japan's Rapidus build 2-nanometre chips
HCLTech and Rapidus have opened development centres in Bengaluru and Hubballi for mask design, process design kits and design-technology co-optimisation, giving Indian engineers hands-on work on a leading-edge foundry process.
Japan's most ambitious chip project now has an Indian engineering arm. On 26 October 2026, HCLTech and Rapidus Corporation opened two development centres in Karnataka, one in Bengaluru and one in Hubballi, to support the Japanese company's push to manufacture 2-nanometre logic chips. The centres will take on some of the most specialised pre-manufacturing work in the semiconductor business.
The deal does not move a single wafer to India. What it moves is design and process know-how, the layer of work that sits between a chip designer's idea and a working fab, and that is where India has the most to gain right now.
What the centres will do
According to the companies, the Bengaluru and Hubballi centres will give Rapidus five kinds of support:
- Mask design, the preparation of the photomasks that carry a chip's patterns onto silicon during lithography.
- Design infrastructure, the tools, flows and computing environment that chip design teams depend on.
- Process design kit (PDK) development, the rulebooks and models a foundry gives customers so their designs can be built on its process.
- Design technology co-optimisation (DTCO), in which transistor, cell and process choices are tuned together rather than in sequence.
- Layout design, the physical placement and routing of circuits.
HCLTech will also work with Rapidus to build a pipeline of Indian engineering talent for the company's needs in Japan. Neither company has said how many engineers will work at the centres, how work will be split between the two cities, or what the arrangement is worth.
Why Rapidus needs this
Rapidus was set up in 2022 with the backing of the Japanese government and a group of Japanese companies to bring leading-edge logic manufacturing back to Japan. It is building its plant in Chitose, Hokkaido, and is aiming at 2-nanometre production, a node where only a handful of companies in the world operate.
Building a fab is only part of that task. A new foundry also needs a mature PDK, proven design flows and enough engineers to help customers bring their chips to the new process. Those are exactly the areas the Indian centres will cover. Rapidus Representative Director and CEO Atsuyoshi Koike said building an engineering ecosystem is central to the company's next-generation manufacturing plans, and that the tie-up gives it access to India's growing pool of semiconductor engineers and dedicated development capacity that complements its operations in Japan.
HCLTech CEO and Managing Director C Vijayakumar said: "Advanced semiconductors will define the technologies of the next decade." He also described the partnership as strengthening ties between Japan and India.
HCLTech's growing chip business
The Rapidus work moves HCLTech further upstream. Testing and validation happen after a chip is made. PDKs, DTCO and mask preparation happen before it, and they need close, long-term collaboration with the foundry itself. For an Indian engineering services firm, that is high-value work that is hard to win.
What it means for India
Design and process engineering have always been India's strongest part of the chip value chain. Large numbers of the world's chip designers already work in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Noida, mostly for US companies. The Rapidus centres add something newer: hands-on work on a leading-edge foundry process. Engineers who help write a 2-nanometre PDK or tune DTCO for a new process build skills that are in short supply worldwide. That pool of experience could later support India's own fabs as they move to more advanced nodes.
The choice of Hubballi is also notable. Most chip work in Karnataka is concentrated in Bengaluru. A second centre in north Karnataka spreads that work to a city with its own engineering colleges and lower costs, in line with the state's efforts to grow technology jobs outside the capital.
The partnership also fits a wider pattern of India and Japan working together on semiconductors. The two governments signed a memorandum of cooperation in 2023 covering design, manufacturing, equipment research, talent and supply-chain resilience. Japanese chip companies, short of engineers at home, have been looking to India for talent. Rapidus is the most prominent of them so far.
What to watch
The details still to come are the useful ones: how many engineers the centres will employ, whether Indian staff will rotate through Hokkaido, and whether the work goes beyond support services to joint development. Rapidus has said it plans to begin mass production around 2027. If that schedule holds, the next year will show how central the Karnataka teams become to bringing up its process.
For now, the message is clear enough. When a company sets out to build one of the world's most advanced chip processes, it is turning to Indian engineers to help make it work.