Obsolete26

India will never produce an NVIDIA, and it has nothing to do with talent. R&D is the purest form of investment, and the central bank has spent decades making investment the dumbest thing you can do with a rupee. I've been surfing the semiconductor wave for a while now, reading 10-Ks for fun. Spent last month in the Bay Area and the gap between India and the US is not a gap; it's a different universe. Conversations about agentic AI and the next decade of hardware, with my boomer relatives Waymo-ing around SF and self-driving home on Tesla FSD like it's normal. Nobody there thinks any of this is remarkable; they already live in the future. NVIDIA spends nearly twice as much on R&D as every listed company in India combined. Silicon Motion, the world's leading maker of NAND flash controllers and around since 1995, ploughs 29.7% of revenue back into R&D. Micron runs 10.2%, NVIDIA 9.9%, on revenue bases that dwarf anything we have. India Inc? 0.85% of turnover, and half our listed companies report zero R&D at all. The easy move is to lambast our promoters and the dhandomaxxing capitalist class, or the foreign MNCs running India as a glorified offshoring unit, or the babus who fund nothing useful. Satisfying. But Wrong. The reason no rational Indian founder pours money into frontier R&D is that there is genuinely no payoff at the end of it. Why? 1. R&D compounds, and compounding punishes laggards. At the edge of science a 1-2% gain is a moat; Intel spent 20+ years performing impossible physics every 24 months because Moore's Law was the business model, and that consistency makes them one of the goated companies of all time even after they got mogged recently. NVIDIA lives the same way today: invent at the limit or cease to exist. If you're 50% behind, no quantum of innovation closes that. You never touch the high end. You stay a mass-market producer of things that already exist. India is precisely there. 2. The supply side is the real thesis, and it's monetary. Two decades of high inflation, high money-printing, high nominal rates. That regime subsidises consumption and taxes patience. R&D is the longest-duration, highest-variance bet on the board; it is the first thing a 8% risk-free rate kills. Frontier R&D only ever gets funded two ways: a psychopathically risk-tolerant capitalist with cheap capital, or a state with Stalin-grade control. The USSR took agrarian peasants to the first man in space in 20 years; China built its own version. India has neither the state capacity, the political will, nor the balance sheet to do that. So nobody does it. Talent was never the bottleneck. Capital structure was. If you want a SpaceX or a TSMC born here, you need an environment where a conglomerate can deploy $10B and sleep at night: a low-rate regime that makes long-duration investment rational, IP and patent courts that actually function, and policy that doesn't get rewritten every 2-3 years on a minister's whim. Stability is the input. Innovation is the output. Bay Area versus Bombay, we are several universes apart, and you cannot print your way across that distance; you can only compound your way there, and we've spent years optimising for the opposite. The gap won't be bridged. With luck, it narrows.

Hot take: With AI booming, GCC culture will take a hit. Indian and US employees are both spending Claude tokens in dollar, so there isn't much difference in shifting and outsourcing to India for cheap labor.

Next time a VC tells you your company is not VC-scale, send them this