mumbai/new delhi, Oct. 2 -- Chip giants including Nvidia Corp., Intel Corp., and Arm Holdings Plc. are aggressively recruiting at India's elite engineering schools, chasing top talent critical to supremacy in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). 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 colleges amid a generally weak job market, at a time many Indian corporations are cutting back on campus recruitment. Mint spoke to Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, as well as the campus placement teams of IIT-Patna, Dharwad, Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar and NITs in Jamshedpur, Surat and Raipur. The placement executives broadly agreed that interest in semiconductor roles has increased 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 December 1, many other engineering colleges start early and are increasingly relying on pre-placement offers 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 students compensation packages well above the campus median, ranging from Rs.15 lakh to high-end profiles commanding Rs.30-35 lakh. Applied Materials India chief operating officer Radhika Vishwanathan noted a "growing interest among students in deep tech and semiconductor-related roles," reflecting the sector's escalating prominence. Tata Electronics has approached multiple institutions for chip talent, placement executives said. The company is looking to establish a comprehensive semiconductor ecosystem in India by building the country's first major commercial chip fab unit in Gujarat in partnership with PSMC, and an Assembly, Testing, Marking, and Packaging facility in Assam. Hiring in electronics has surged while IT has slowed, said V. Ramgopal Rao, vice-chancellor at BITS, Pilani. Qualcomm, Micron, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Sandisk, NXP, Marvell, Cadence Design, ARM and AMD have visited BITS for so-called very large-scale integration or VLSI roles covering chip design, verification, and physical implementation, Rao said. Student placement coordinator at one of the NITs mentioned above drew a parallel with the previous year's placement wherein semiconductor firms hired late in December and January. Nvidia, Dell, Intel, Arm, Lenovo, Tata Electronics and the IITs including Ropar, Patna, Gandhinagar, Palakkad, Bhilai, Jammu, Goa, Jodhpur, Hyderabad, Bhubaneswar, Tirupati, Indore and Dharwad and NIITs mentioned above did not respond to Mint's queries....