April 2026

As of early 2026, Bengaluru has officially crossed the milestone of hosting 1,000 Global Capability Centers (GCCs). The city reached this mark in April 2026, solidifying its position as the largest GCC hub in the world.

A Global Capability Center (GCC) is an offshore or nearshore unit established by a multinational corporation (MNC) to handle specialized business functions.
Historically known as "Global In-house Centers" or "Captive Centers," they have evolved significantly over the last decade:

Old Model: Focused on low-cost "back-office" operations (data entry, basic IT support).
New Model: Focuses on high-value innovation. These centers now run core product engineering, R&D, AI/ML development, and global cybersecurity for their parent companies.

Why Bengaluru? The city holds roughly 30–35% of India's total GCC workforce. Major companies like SAP, Siemens Healthineers, and Volkswagen use their Bengaluru centers not just for support, but as strategic hubs to build global products. For example, SAP’s Bengaluru campus is its second-largest R&D hub globally, right after its headquarters in Germany.

India and Chip Manufacturing

In the semiconductor industry, the production of a chip is split into two distinct worlds: design and manufacturing. The terms "fab" and "fabless" describe which part of that process a company owns.
What is a "Fab"?

"Fab" is short for a Semiconductor Fabrication Plant. This is the actual physical factory where silicon wafers are processed into integrated circuits (chips).
A fab is one of the most expensive and complex environments on Earth.
The Environment: They require "clean rooms" with almost zero dust particles, as a single speck of dust can ruin a circuit.
The Cost: Building a modern, leading-edge fab (like those for 3nm or 2nm chips) can cost between $10 billion and $20 billion.
The Machinery: They use Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines, which are roughly the size of a bus and cost over $150 million each.

A fabless company designs the chip’s architecture, logic, and layout but does not own a factory to make them.
Instead, they send their designs (blueprints) to a third-party manufacturer (a Foundry) to handle the physical production.
Focus: R&D, software, and intellectual property (IP).
Advantages: They avoid the massive "overhead" and financial risk of building and maintaining a factory. This allows them to iterate faster on new designs.
Building a Fab in India (like the ongoing projects in Gujarat) is a massive infrastructure play that takes years. However, creating Fabless startups is a software and engineering play. Since India has a deep pool of VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) engineers, the goal is for Indian engineers to stop just testing chips for US-based Nvidia or Qualcomm and start designing Indian-owned chips (e.g., Shakti or Ajit processors) that are then sent to TSMC for manufacturing.