Chatting with Shereen Bhan, Managing Editor, CNBC-TV18, on the fourteenth version of CNBC-TV18 and Sify current Voices from the Valley, a particular presentation as a part of Younger Turks, the world’s longest-running present on startups and entrepreneurship, the COO provided a portrait not merely of his personal profession however of an organization, and a rustic, in purposeful movement.
The Lengthy Wager
UST was began on the identical day in 1999 in Aliso Viejo, California, and in Thiruvananthapuram, a symmetry that captured the ambition of certainly one of its key architects, the venerable G.A. Menon, to fold Kerala’s mental capital into the worldwide expertise economic system.
Gilroy Mathew, then a younger graduate with a retail background, joined when UST’s first buyer proved to be a number one retailer. He later helmed UST’s foray into semiconductor engineering, a observe seeded seventeen years in the past in a Bengaluru R&D laboratory that now defines the corporate’s id.
It looks like a prescient guess, since chips, relatively than the AI functions constructed atop them, are more likely to decide the subsequent expertise period. Essentially the most telling illustration is the return of the CPU. Written off within the GPU-dominated cloud period, the processor is again.
“CPUs are coming again due to Ambient Intelligence. That’s an enormous shift,” Gilroy Mathew tells Shereen Bhan, alluding to a world the place AI is embedded into each bodily system. The orchestration layer that this agentic AI requires will run on CPUs.
The Ecosystem Benefit
India’s semiconductor alternative is framed in opposition to this international backdrop. UST’s reply is the ₹3,330-crore Outsourced Semiconductor Meeting and Check (OSAT) facility at Sanand, Gujarat, developed with Kaynes Expertise, inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi in early 2026. OSAT covers the testing and packaging of semiconductor chips that comply with fabrication.
With Fabrication Crops nonetheless years away, packaging supplies a viable entry level for India into the semiconductor worth chain. Part one, with eleven manufacturing traces throughout a 46-acre web site, is already transport. Part two, concentrating on superior packaging nodes, is deliberate for 2028.
Ecosystem, Gilroy Mathew insists, issues greater than any single plant. Value competitiveness and expertise depth are nurtured inside industrial clusters. Gilroy Mathew reviews that UST is in energetic dialogue with firms from america, Europe, and Taiwan to deepen India’s semiconductor orbit, whereas investing in a design home for Very-Giant-Scale Integration (VLSI) semiconductor chips and customized Software-Particular Built-in Circuit (ASIC) functionality in India. A important hole stays. “The shortfall for design sources may be very, very excessive,” Gilroy Mathew says.
The Age Of Convergence
The automotive dimension illustrates a parallel convergence. The trendy car is software program working on wheels. In December 2025, UST acquired a majority stake in Italdesign, the Turin-based design and engineering agency based by Giorgetto Giugiaro and accountable for the Volkswagen Golf, amongst a number of different iconic designs.
Collectively, they intention to develop into suppliers of complete built-in providers, from {hardware} design to software program improvement, for a brand new period of digitally-enabled automobiles. Moreover, a wise manufacturing facility platform UST constructed for European producers can also be migrating to India, the place a connected-vehicle resolution already hyperlinks 250,000 vehicles, correlating eighty telematic parameters through AI.
Underpinning every thing is a income ambition commensurate with the strategic scope. Gilroy Mathew envisions a platform-based resolution promoting driving the corporate’s development via to 2030. Engineering, he argues, is not going to be commoditised the way in which software program will.
The corporate’s seventeen-year guess on semiconductor engineering, positioned effectively earlier than the present frenzy, positions it to seize worth throughout the complete stack as edge compute alone approaches half a trillion {dollars} within the subsequent three years. In 2026, Gilroy Mathew’s twenty-seventh 12 months at UST, and the twenty-fourth 12 months of Younger Turks, the person and the second have discovered one another in precisely the best season.