In November 2025, a chip the size of a fingernail was unveiled in New Delhi by Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Electronics & IT — and it carried a first for India. ARKA GKT-1, built by Hyderabad’s Azimuth AI with Cyient Semiconductors, is India’s first-generation intelligent-power platform-on-a-chip: a single piece of silicon designed to bring real intelligence to the edge, where the data is born, instead of sending it hundreds of kilometres away to a data centre. A year on, the chip has moved from unveiling to the phase that matters most — production deployments and scale.
One chip, a whole system
Most of the devices that run India’s infrastructure — the smart meter on a wall, the sensor on a factory floor, the controller in a battery bank — still rely on a handful of separate chips, each doing one job. ARKA GKT-1 folds them into one. The company says the chip integrates multi-core custom computing, advanced analog sensing, memory and intelligent power management into a single, ultra-low-power system-on-chip, built on Azimuth AI’s software-defined silicon architecture and Cyient Semiconductors’ mixed-signal and low-energy ASIC expertise.
The result is a chip that can sense, think and manage power at the same time, while sipping electricity. That combination is what edge AI has been waiting for: intelligence that lives inside the device itself, analysing data the moment it is generated, without the delay, cost and connectivity dependence of the cloud.
The ARKA GKT-1 chip, held up at its first hello-world bring-up. Image: Azimuth AI.
Built for the edge, not the data centre
Azimuth AI designed ARKA GKT-1 for the places where intelligence has to be frugal. Smart utilities and smart meters are the first frontier: meters that analyse consumption in real time, spot anomalies and help the grid balance itself. The same chip is built for battery and energy-storage management, industrial automation, smart-city infrastructure and edge AI nodes — the quiet layer of electronics that keeps modern infrastructure running.
It is a market where India has long bought its silicon from abroad. ARKA GKT-1’s intellectual property is fully owned in India, and the platform is designed to be customised for domestic and global customers — a foundation for future variants rather than a one-off design. The company says the platform will be available for partner-driven development, supporting custom system-on-chip variants and IP licensing.
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Silicon, up close: the dies that become chips like ARKA GKT-1. Image: Azimuth AI.
A Hyderabad–California story
Azimuth AI was founded in 2023 by Praveen Yasarapu, its CEO, with Sridevi Badiga as co-founder. The company works from two innovation hubs — Sacramento in California and Hyderabad in Telangana — and its leadership team brings experience from companies including Intel. The company’s own account puts it simply: intelligence, engineered into silicon.
The Cyient connection runs deep. Cyient, the Hyderabad engineering major, took a 27.3% stake in Azimuth AI in October 2024, and its wholly owned subsidiary Cyient Semiconductors handled the turnkey journey from design to fabrication and testing for ARKA GKT-1. In early 2026, Azimuth AI announced a new funding round led by Jetha Global, with participation from Moneta Ventures and AUM Ventures — and with it, a clear statement of intent from Yasarapu: 2026 would be “a new phase defined by production deployments and scale.”
Why it matters
India’s semiconductor ambitions are usually told in the language of fabs and foundries. ARKA GKT-1 tells the other half of the story: the design. A country that can design its own intelligent-power silicon — and own the IP outright — can build its smart grids, meters and industrial systems on a foundation it controls, customised for its own needs, and sell that same silicon to the world.
As the minister put it at the unveiling, “The ARKA GKT-1 showcases India’s capability to design and develop world-class semiconductor technologies for critical global industries.” A year after that unveiling, the chip is doing what it was built to do — leaving the launch stage and going to work, one smart meter, one battery bank and one factory floor at a time.
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