Rebuilding for growth with silicon-led AI transformation

How we helped a leading global digital platform turned disruption into double-digit growth through custom silicon and GenAI infrastructure.

10 min read

Overview

When a leading global digital platform lost a major revenue stream almost overnight, it hit a critical inflection point. Instead of relying on incremental fixes, the organization took a decisive, forward-looking approach—reimagining its technology foundation to unlock new growth. By investing in custom silicon and GenAI-driven infrastructure, it set out to regain control over performance, cost efficiency, and innovation at scale.

This shift enabled a tighter integration between advanced silicon capabilities and AI workloads, accelerating model development, reducing reliance on external ecosystems, and creating a more resilient, scalable foundation.

The result: a transition from revenue disruption to renewed, double-digit growth—turning silicon into a powerful engine for AI-led transformation.

The Challenge

A sudden ecosystem shift triggered an immediate and severe business impact:

Multi-billion-dollar revenue loss
Declining product usage and customer stickiness
Increased dependence on third-party silicon and infrastructure
Rising total cost of ownership (TCO)

The underlying issue went deeper than revenue; it exposed limited control over the technology stack powering future growth.

The Opportunity

To compete at hyperscale, the organization redefined its approach around ownership and speed. It set out to:

Support 3.27 billion daily active users at scale
Manage 12+ million servers across compute, storage and AI/HPC
Enable next-generation GenAI workloads at scale
Ensure 99.999% uptime while accelerating innovation cycles

The focus shifted towards building a tightly integrated stack spanning silicon, infrastructure and AI.

The Solution

The transformation was executed as a tightly integrated silicon-to-AI strategy, powered by Chip2AIQ.

AI-powered silicon innovation
- Built custom training accelerators to internalize AI capabilities
- Developed inference chips to reduce reliance on merchant silicon
- Introduced a video codec chip delivering significantly higher efficiency than CPUs
- Advanced silicon generations, from 7nm to 5nm nodes, improving performance, power efficiency and scalability for AI workloads
Hyperscale AI infrastructure enablement
- Deployed 16K GPU clusters for large-scale model training
- Reduced model development cycles to under two months
- Processed 405B tokens with high training efficiency
Platform & ecosystem transformation
- Leveraged Open Compute platforms for scalable AI workloads
- Enabled seamless integration across silicon, firmware and data center layers

The Differentiator: Chip2AIQ

At the heart of the transformation was HCLTech’s Chip2AIQ framework, bridging the gap between silicon innovation and real-world AI adoption.

Chip2AIQ enabled:

End-to-end integration from chip design to AI deployment
Faster realization of performance gains at the application level
Scalable, AI-ready infrastructure aligned with hyperscale demands

HCLTech’s Role

HCLTech acted as a strategic transformation partner, delivering across the entire silicon-to-AI lifecycle:

End-to-end silicon engineering: design, integration and firmware
Post-silicon validation labs: setup, scale and operations
AI-led infrastructure deployment and optimization
Fleet health analytics for continuous performance tuning
Open Compute platform validation at scale

The Impact

Business outcomes

10%+ YoY revenue growth, beating analyst expectations
Return to double-digit growth after 8 quarters
22%+ QoQ growth driven by GenAI adoption

Product & user impact

1.5x increase in product usage within two quarters
Improved performance leading to higher user stickiness and advertiser adoption

Operational & financial efficiency

50%+ reduction in TCO
Faster AI cycles with sub-2-month model development timelines

Conclusion

The combination of custom silicon, GenAI, and hyperscale infrastructure enabled a fundamental shift in how the organization builds and scales intelligence.

The result is a more resilient, high-performance foundation, designed to support continuous innovation and sustained growth.