Chip leaders dangle juicy offers to snap up top campus talent

Chip giants including Nvidia Corp., Intel Corp., and Arm Holdings Plc. are aggressively recruiting at India’s elite engineering schools, chasing top talent critical tosupremacy in theage ofartificial intelligence (AI).

- Pratistha Bagai & Devina Sengupta

During this placement season, demand at the younger Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs) has focused on students with an aptitude in chip design, advanced communications like 5G and 6G, and quantum computing. This surge provides a crucial buffer for the collegesamid a generally weak job market, at a time when many Indian corporationsare cutting back on campus recruitment.

Mintspoke to Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS)-Pilani as well as the campus placement teams of IIT-Patna, Dharwad, Bhuban-eswar, and NITs in Jamshedpur, Surat and Raipur. The placement executives broadly agreed that interest in semiconductor roles hasincreased compared to previous years.

While the older, first-generation IITs including IIT Kharagpur, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Kanpur and IIT Delhi will begin their campus placement sessions on 1 December, many other engineering colleges start early, andare increasingly relyingon pre-placement offers extended after successful internships.

Placement officials confirm that a cluster of firms, including Dell Technologies, Lenovo Group, and Tata Electronics, have joined the fray alongside the large global chipmakers. At several institutions, Intel and Nvidia have offered some studentscompensation packages well above the campus median, ranging from ₹15 lakh to high-end profiles commanding ₹30-35 lakh.