New joint venture! Micromax collaborates with Taiwan’s Phison to launch ‘MiPhi’, a designing and manufacturing giant for storage chips in India.
Indian consumer electronics brand Micromax has partnered with Taiwan’s Phison to establish a joint venture to design and manufacture storage chips, including solid-state drives (SSDs), in India.
This new entity, named MiPhi, will be majority-owned by Micromax with a 55% stake, while Phison will hold the remaining 45%. Despite India’s strength in other technology design areas, it seeks to address the country’s lack of storage module design capabilities.
These storage chips will be manufactured at Micromax’s Noida facility, with the company planning to expand its team to 1000 employees focused on chip design.
MiPhi is already in discussions with large companies for potential orders and aims to start commercial shipments in the coming year.
Rahul Sharma, co-founder of Micromax, emphasised the importance of developing indigenous storage solutions to reduce reliance on foreign technology. The partnership’s goal is to make India self-sufficient in storage technology and cut costs in sectors like artificial intelligence (AI), enterprise, and automotive.
Sharma further revealed that MiPhi’s custom-designed NAND storage solutions would significantly reduce the cost of GPU deployment for AI models, making the technology more accessible. One of their key products, aiDAPTIV, can train AI models with minimal GPUs, a process that would typically require 70-80 GPUs.
Phison’s CEO, KS Pua, highlighted the synergy between Micromax’s local market expertise and Phison’s advanced storage technologies, which will enable the venture to create impactful solutions for various industries.
The Indian government’s semiconductor incentive scheme is also expected to support the venture, particularly as it looks to foster intellectual property generation in chip design.
