The Bengaluru and Hubli centres will support Rapidus’s advanced chip development while giving the Japanese company access to India’s semiconductor engineering talent.
HCLTech and Japan’s Rapidus have opened two development centres in India as part of a wider effort to support advanced semiconductor engineering and broaden the talent base available to the Japanese chipmaker. According to company statements, the facilities are intended to handle work on mask design, design infrastructure, process design kit development, design technology co-optimisation and layout design.
The centres are in Bengaluru and Hubli, with the opening marked at HCLTech’s global headquarters in Noida, Rapidus said. The move gives Rapidus a dedicated Indian engineering base while HCLTech expands its semiconductor capabilities beyond the services already being developed for chip design and validation work. Industry reporting also noted that HCLTech opened a ₹185 crore semiconductor test and validation laboratory in Bengaluru in September 2026, underscoring the company’s broader push into the sector.
Rapidus chief executive Atsuyoshi Koike said the partnership would help the company tap India’s growing pool of semiconductor engineers and build dedicated development capacity that complements its operations in Japan. HCLTech chief executive C Vijayakumar said the collaboration reflects deepening strategic ties between Japan and India and could help speed up chip adoption and shorten time-to-market for advanced semiconductor technologies.
Rapidus, established in Tokyo in August 2022, is developing 2-nanometre logic chips at its plant in Chitose, Hokkaido, according to industry reporting. The new Indian centres appear designed to support that ambition by shifting some engineering work offshore while helping Rapidus build a longer-term talent pipeline for its Japanese operations. Neither company disclosed the number of jobs involved or the financial terms of the arrangement.
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