NEW DELHI: American multinational semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices is planning to expand its team in India nearly 40% by hiring 500 engineers to strengthen its focus on new technologies including augmented reality and virtual reality (AR and VR). In addition to this, the company is also looking to reskill its employees in AR and VR. “We are looking at AR and VR for now. We will hire fresh talent, but also we are heavily investing in upskilling and reskilling our existing employees to contribute to the changing demands,” said Kiranmai Pendyala, chief operating officer-HR, AMD This is similar to its strategy a few years ago, when it started working on game console technologies and shifted a part of its workforce to the new unit. “We had set up the Radeon Technologies group to exclusively work in the graphics space, and identified machine learning and virtual reality as new growth sectors for us,” Pendyala said.Initially, AMD did not have these skillsets among its employees in Hyderabad and had to bring in some talent from the US. “We did job rotations, short-term assignments in different countries and practised reverse mentoring,” Pendyala said.AMD is also sourcing talent and knowhow in technologies from institutes in the US such as MIT and University of Texas, Austin, apart from Indian institutes such as IITs and IIIT Hyderabad . In India, the Sunnyvale, California headquartered company has 18% women among its 1,300 employees, higher than its global average of 15%. More than 50% of its workforce is outside of the Americas. Only 300 of its employees in India are in the software segment. “We largely have hardware engineers, that is, people who work with silicon,” Pendyala said.