US storage technology firm ScaleFlux plans to double its total investment in India to USD 60 million and hire more than 100 engineers as the artificial intelligence (AI) boom drives explosive demand for advanced storage solutions, the company's Chief Executive Officer said on Thursday.
Hao Zhong, CEO and Co-founder of the Milpitas, California-based semiconductor startup, inaugurated the company's new Design and Innovation Centre in Bellandur, Bengaluru. This facility, he said could seat more than 160 people, up from a current headcount of roughly 60 full-time staff and 20 contractors.
"India is probably, in recent years, the fastest growing, in terms of headcount, engineering talent and even potential business growing," Zhong told BW Businessworld in an exclusive interview.
ScaleFlux, which designs controller silicon, firmware and computational storage chips used in enterprise SSDs, has been present in India for about five years. It started with a team of around 10 engineers focused on its first silicon design and has since completed two chip generations, with a third underway.
Zhong said the company had invested approximately USD 30 million in the country over last couple of years and now plans to invest an additional USD 30 million over the next two to three years.
The expanded centre will focus on ASIC and SoC design, storage architecture, performance optimisation and platform validation. Zhong described this work as core to the company's global product roadmap rather than peripheral engineering support.
"From end-to-end, we have design engineers here to design and integrate the SOC, we have verification team to do the silicon verification, and also we have a physical design team, DFT team," he said, adding that the company was also building out a solutions engineering function to pursue commercial opportunities in the Indian market.
Local Data Centres In Focus
Beyond its R&D mandate, ScaleFlux is increasingly treating India as a revenue market. Zhong said the company was working with domestic data centre operators and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) including Dell, and that India-sourced revenue was growing faster than before.
He pointed specifically to locally-owned and operated Indian data centres, rather than hyperscalers, as the primary commercial opportunity.
"India is actually also building its own branding and its own local data centres with local operators. I think this is a good opportunity for us to be part of that and help them to build up advanced data centre technology," he said.
According to CareEdge Ratings, India’s data centre capacity is projected to reach approximately 4 GW by FY30, underpinned by a substantial investment potential of around Rs 1.5 lakh crore over the period leading up to FY30
Zhong said the percentage of global revenues attributable to India was still modest but that the growth trajectory was compelling enough to warrant the accelerated investment.
AI Inflection Drives Storage Demand
ScaleFlux positions itself as a supplier to the AI infrastructure stack rather than a competitor to systems companies such as Dell EMC, NetApp or Everpure (Pure Storage), which Zhong said are customers and partners rather than rivals. The company sells the controller chips those firms embed in their storage products.
Zhong said the AI market had entered a second wave, shifting from compute-intensive model training to inference, a transition he argued was fundamentally reshaping storage requirements.
"The model size is increasing and the context window is increasing, and meanwhile the multiple sessions of the AI conversation are accumulating more and more data," he said. "That's why memory itself is not enough. You need more storage, and essentially SSD storage is becoming the new memory."
He said this dynamic was driving what he described as orders-of-magnitude growth in demand for capacity across the memory and storage hierarchy, a market ScaleFlux is seeking to capitalise on with its vertically integrated chip platform.
'Make In India' Move
Zhong also said ScaleFlux had begun early-stage work with local manufacturing partners, including exploratory engagement with programmes oriented toward fabless semiconductor firms.
"It's just the beginning and we do see the volume increasing. It's still in the early stage, but I look forward to seeing this grow and materialise pretty soon," he said, adding that the company had moved beyond concept discussions and conducted initial testing with identified partners.
Romesh Mehta, Managing Director at ScaleFlux India, said the Bengaluru centre would develop capabilities across chip design, system integration and storage performance, with an emphasis on attracting specialists to work on complex infrastructure challenges.
ScaleFlux, founded in 2014, employs around 300 people globally and has not disclosed its total funding. The company remains privately held. |
