It’s a wrap: News this week (Feb 24 — Mar 1)

There have been multiple developments this week on the tech front. From govt’s approval for chip facilities to Intel’s new company Altera, this is the list of the most important developments for a quick catch-up:

Union Cabinet greenlights semiconductor facilities

The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved the establishment of three new semiconductor units. To be built at a cumulative investment of ₹1.26 lakh crore (or over $15 billion), all the three units are slated to start construction in the next 100 days. Two of these units will be in Gujurat and one in Assam.

These three units are expected to generate direct employment of 20,000 advanced technology jobs along with 60,000 indirect jobs — benefitting automotive, electronics manufacturing, telecom manufacturing, industrial manufacturing, and other semiconductor consuming industries.

Happiest Minds announced organisational restructuring

Indian IT firm Happiest Minds Technologies announced its new vertical organisation structure on Tuesday, comprising six new industry groups. These groups are Industrial, Manufacturing, and Energy & Utilities, Healthcare & Life Sciences, Retail, CPG, and Logistics, Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI), Hi-Tech, and Media & Entertainment, and Edtech.

Ashok Soota, Executive Chairman at Happiest Minds, said, "The potential of this new structure is immense and will be the bedrock of new growth engines, enabling us to compete better in the global markets and realise our vision of reaching $1 billion in revenues by 2031."

Google removes popular Indian apps from playstore

On Friday, Google issued a blog saying it is taking action against developers who have not complied with its billing policies. Shortly after Google began removing some apps, including popular apps like Shaadi.com, Bharat Matrimony, Quack Quack, and Altt. The Alphabet owned company said that the violations have been happening even though developers had three years to comply with Play Store’s payments policy. To be sure, recently, the Madras High Court rejected petitions from several tech companies against Google’s new user choice billing system.

Intel  launches standalone FPGA company

US Chipmaker Intel has announced the launch of a standalone FPGA company to tap on the  $55 billion-plus market opportunity and expand company portfolio. This is the revival of Altera brand, a company Intel had acquired in 2015, which specialised in the FPGA technology for innovation in the data center and Internet of Things market segments. Per the latest announcement, Sandra Rivera, executive vice president and general manager at the Data Centre and AI Group, Intel, will be leading Altera. “We’re leading with a bold, agile and customer-obsessed approach to deliver programmable solutions and accessible AI across a broad range of applications in the comms, cloud, data center, embedded, industrial, automotive and mil-aero market segments,” Rivera said.

LTIMindtree joins IBM Quantum Network

IT services company LTIMindtree became the first Indian Global System Integrator (GSI) to join the IBM Quantum Network, for innovation in quantum computing technology to serve global clientele across multiple industries. IBM Quantum Network is a community of Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, startups and national research labs working with IBM in the quantum technology space. LTIMindtree will also be collaborating with Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras – an  IBM Quantum Innovation Center – on joint quantum research and workforce development.

MWC 2024

The Mobile Worlld Congress 2024 event was held in Barcelona, Spain between February 26-29, this year. It is considered on the landmark mobile technology events of the world. This year, more than 2,700 exhibitors participated, along with overall 101,000 attendees. While the event has heavy consumer tech presence, this year enterprise technology got a boost too. Major announcements include Tech Mahindra’s Project Indus in Bahasa; Intel’s bid at AI PCs for enterprise; AWS’ partnerships in generative AI, network transformation, among others.