US says trade deal with India impetus for more industrial collaboration

HOurs after the promulgation of the India-US merchandise trade, HT sat land with francois jacob Helberg, US Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy and Environment, who said the agreement creates a lot of positive momentum. Helberg, in first comments by a top Trump administration official after the deal, said it will free up a lot of political oxygen that can be channeled towards specific, tactical projects. He also spoke about his plans for a visit to India for the AI Impact Summit this month and the newly announced Pax Silica initiative, which India has been invited to join.The US-India trade deal has just been announced. How will this impact bilateral ties? Discussions between the US and India had been ongoing on critical technologies, even while the trade deal was being negotiated and finalized. Those discussions never stopped, and we’re excited that the successful conclusion of the US- India trade deal actually creates a lot of positive momentum to deepening our industrial collaboration. Our latest initiative Pax Silica is not a trade deal. It really is more a framework to enable industrial collaborative projects, especially between companies, and we think that now that the trade deal is finalized, it will actually help create a lot of momentum and free up a lot of political oxygen that can be channelled towards specific, tactical projects.You are headed to India soon for the AI Impact summit. Talk to us about your plans. So we’re very excited to be heading into India. We’re going to have a very large Trump administration delegation. Under Secretary of Commerce Jeffrey Kessler, Under Secretary William Kimmitt and the director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy Michael Kratsios will be joining. So we’re going to be very well represented. Part of what I’m hoping to achieve going to India is not only including India into the Pax Silica family of nations, but also starting to have tactical conversations with my Indian counterparts on specific projects that we can actually use to hit the ground running on this partnership and build off of the incredible momentum of the US India trade deal. There are a number of very interesting complementary skills that India brings to the table to this partnership. Obviously, India is the largest country of the group. It’s also one of the fastest growing countries. It has a very, very deep pool of talent, and it’s arguably, it’s really the only country that can rival China in terms of the depth of its talent base. So those kinds of advantages lend themselves very well for labor intensive initiatives, especially when we think about embodied AI and the need in order to have the most advanced embodied AI systems, the need to have lots and lots of humans that actually help train data sets for AI action models. So we’re going to have a discussion between the US and India on the spectrum of potential partnerships on the technology supply chain, ranging from embodied AI to critical minerals and logistics. And we’re hoping to come out of those conversations with more definition on a path forward.You recently unveiled the Pax Silica initiative that aims to dominate the future of AI, semiconductors and critical minerals. India was initially not invited and that caused some controversy. Can you tell us more?So we started Pax Silica as a group of countries that were very focused on the manufacturing part of the supply chain. So a lot of the countries that are involved in Pax Silica are countries that are home to some of the world’s most technologically advanced companies, including South Korea, which is home to SK Hynix and Samsung. Japan, which obviously has Mitsui and Mitsubishi and Toyota, among many others. Singapore, which has produced, as manufacturers, 10% of the world’s semiconductors. So that was our initial focus. We knew that that was the starting point. It wasn’t the end destination. We don’t want to grow the group infinitely, but we also knew that we were going to add additional partners, so we started with that set. Obviously, it didn’t get lost upon us that India not being part of the initial set got a lot of attention in India. Ultimately, we were actually having conversations with the Indian government in order to make sure that they were included and and in a matter of days, we actually agreed that this would all come together very nicely.You have said that your Pax Silica initiative is about winning the race for AI innovation, diffusion and dominating supply chains. How does India fit into each of these three races? A. So it really starts with supply chain security. We can’t have diffusion and innovation without supply chain security. Our companies collectively need to be able to build products in order to have products that are both innovative and sold on the global market. And they can’t do that if supply chains are brittle, geographically over-concentrated and unreliable. And so part of the goal is Pax Silica is a conscious choice where countries are picking who their friends are going to be for the next 25 to 50 years, in terms of who we are trusting to be part of this supply chain ecosystem. India has a lot of notable, very important manufacturing companies, including Tata, that have a lot of talent. They have a very deep bench of very robust manufacturing capacity. Reliance is another important one, very involved in the energy industry. And so where we are excited to identify specific opportunities is to actually facilitate and accelerate partnerships between India’s companies, as well as our own part, because we are very focused on companies and the specific capabilities of certain companies. We really view this as positive sum so in certain cases, we’re hoping to encourage joint ventures. In others, it’ll just, it’ll mainly be through strategic partnerships. But ultimately, we really view this as a complementary positive sum partnership.America turning to Pakistan as a supplier of critical minerals has attracted much attention in India. This has caused some concern in India. However, Pakistan isn’t part of Pax Silica. What is Washington’s thinking there?All I’m going to say is that we value our partnership with India. We’re very proud of the trade deal that was negotiated today, and we’re excited to be welcoming India into the Pax Silica framework next week. We have not to date had conversations about Pakistan joining Pax Silica. And because our approach is very dispassionately focused on companies, that will continue to be our North Star for decisions about membership.You are hosting a big critical minerals ministerial meeting this week in which India’s External Affairs Minister will also be participating. Could you talk about what you’re hoping to see out of it?Well, it is the largest ministerial hosted in the state in State Department history. We’re very proud of the Herculean effort that participants have undertaken to travel from around the world to be here as well as we’re very proud of our staff for having coordinated such a gargantuan effort. We are going to have some very honest conversations about what it’s going to take in order for us collectively to realistically secure the mineral supply chain. These countries wouldn’t be here unless they agree that this is a priority for all of us. There’s only one country on Earth that concentrates 90 to 100% of mineral refining capacity. Everyone knows who knows who that country is, and regardless of how you feel about that country, I think everyone agrees that the world’s entire refining capacity being concentrated in a single point of failure is not good economic security. And so ultimately we are going to have a very thorough conversation about what it will take in order for us to actually have more redundancy, more reliability and more transparency in our supply chains.