India 'highly strategic potential partner' in supply chain security-related efforts: US

New York/Washington: The US views India as a “highly strategic potential partner” in supply chain security-related efforts and welcomes the opportunity to engage with the country, following New Delhi's exclusion from a recently launched Washington-led initiative on silicon supply chain. Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg told reporters on Wednesday at a Foreign Press Centre briefing that the US is having "ongoing conversations” with India about ways of "deepening our economic security collaboration.” Last week, the US launched ‘Pax Silica’, a strategic initiative to build a secure, prosperous, and innovation-driven silicon supply chain—from critical minerals and energy inputs to advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and logistics. The initiative includes Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Australia. It, however, did not include India. With the exception of India, all other Quad countries - Japan, Australia and the US - are part of the new initiative.

Helberg acknowledged that there has been "a lot of speculation” behind India not being included in Pax Silica and denied that there was any link between Delhi’s exclusion and current tensions with Washington. “So my understanding is that there was a lot of speculation behind India not participating in the Pax Silica Summit,” Helberg said in response to a question on why India was not included in the Pax Silica initiative and whether it was due to political tensions between the two sides. “I want to be clear that the conversations between the United States and India pertaining to trade arrangements are a completely separate and parallel track to our discussions on supply chain security. We are not conflating those two things. We view India as a highly strategic potential partner on supply chain security-related efforts, and we welcome the opportunity to engage with them,” he said. Helberg added that he is in “nearly daily communication" with interlocutors in Delhi and “we are actively determining ways of actually deepening that collaboration quickly.” Helberg said he will be attending the India AI Impact Summit to be held in February, which he said “will provide us an opportunity to meet in person and hopefully determine some tangible milestones. “But we do plan to very much deepen our bilateral collaboration between the United States and India on economic security matters,” he added. New Delhi will host the India-AI Impact Summit 2026 on February 19-20, focusing on the principles of ‘People, Planet, and Progress’. The Summit, announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the France AI Action Summit, will be the first-ever global AI summit hosted in the Global South. Helberg said the Pax Silica initiative aims at securing the silicon supply chain, which he described as the “lifeblood" of cutting-edge technologies, from cars to the smartphone industry and artificial intelligence. Explaining the rationale behind the selection of the initial countries for Pax Silica, he said, while a lot of countries contribute different pieces to the overall global supply chain, “we focused on a segment of the supply chain that was very focused on semiconductor manufacturing.”

In this regard, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and the Netherlands really form the “nucleus of semiconductor manufacturing. “And so we decided to start there – to start by having a smaller group discussion – before we started branching out to second and third degree down in the stack of the supply chain,” he said. He stressed that it is very much part of “our workplan” for 2026 to have a very clear path for countries that are aligned, reliable and who bring unique contributions to the table, in order to allow them to actually join the Pax Silica framework. The Pax Silica initiative aims to reduce coercive dependencies, protect the materials and capabilities foundational to artificial intelligence, and ensure aligned nations can develop and deploy transformative technologies at scale, the State Department has said. Helberg and representatives from Japan, Israel, Australia, Singapore, and the Republic of Korea inaugurated Pax Silica last Friday by signing the Pax Silica Declaration, advancing US President Donald Trump’s “call for a new era of economic statecraft that produces peace and security for America and its allies through the power of private investment, free enterprise, and economics. Additional signatories are expected to follow.” The inaugural Pax Silica Summit convened counterparts from the eight countries. “Together, these countries are home to the most important companies and investors powering the global AI supply chain,” the State Department said. The department said that the United States is organising a coalition of countries around the principle of building a secure, resilient, and innovation-driven ecosystem across the entire global technology supply chain—from critical minerals and energy inputs to advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, and logistics. “Pax Silica is a new kind of international grouping and partnership – one that aims to unite the countries that host the world’s most advanced technology companies to unleash the economic potential of the new AI age. Pax Silica seeks to establish a durable economic order that underwrites an AI-driven era of prosperity across partner countries,” it had said.