Apple to set up a chip designing team at India R&D centre: Report

California- based technology giant Apple’s engineers will start working on chip design at its research and development centre in Bengaluru, the Times of India reports. 

The news comes months after Apple and chipmaker Intel had signed an agreement for Apple to acquire the majority of Intel’s smartphone modem business in July.

Around 160 Intel engineers in Bengaluru are part of this business and will move to Apple, TOI reported citing its sources. 

The agreement between Apple and Intel was approximately valued at around $1 billion. According to the initial agreement, 2,200 Intel employees were supposed to join Apple, along with intellectual property, equipment and leases.  

Analysts believe that the deal with Intel has given Apple a headstart in the 5G modem development space as Intel has been working on working on developing 5G modems for quite some time, Times of India reports. 

TechCircle has reached out to Apple for a comment and is awaiting a response. 

Recently, Apple also started selling locally assembled iPhone XR in India and the production was started at Foxconn's facility in Chennai. This is seen as Apple's plans to bring the production of all its premium iPhone models to India.

Earlier this year, another technology major, Google, hired more than a dozen of microchip engineers in Bengaluru.

Amazon, Samsung and other major companies are also reportedly working on designing their own chips instead of depending on semiconductor companies like Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm.