India spent decades importing every chip it used. Since 2021 it has approved twelve chip plants, opened its first ones and handed over its first made-in-India memory modules. What has been approved, what is actually running, what it costs the public purse, and what India still cannot make. Start simple, go as deep as you like.
Stuck at any point? Ask an AI about this page →In December 2021 India's cabinet approved the Semicon India Programme with ₹76,000 crore to build a chip industry from almost nothing 1. The government pays up to half the cost of an approved plant 2. In July 2026 it approved a second, larger phase, Semicon 2.0, worth ₹1,27,500 crore 3.
The original scheme offered different support for different kinds of plant: up to 50% for chip and display factories, but only 30% for packaging and compound-semiconductor units 1. In September 2022 the cabinet levelled this up to 50% for everything, paid in step with the company's own spending 2. The India Semiconductor Mission runs the schemes 5.
Semicon 2.0 has six parts: design, machines and materials, more fabs, packaging, research aimed at nodes more advanced than the 28 to 110 nanometres India starts with, and talent 3. The February 2026 budget had set aside ₹1,000 crore for ISM 2.0 and ₹8,000 crore for the existing programme in 2026-27, before the larger July approval 6 7.
Twelve plants have been approved. The government groups them as one silicon chip factory, one silicon-carbide factory, one display factory and nine assembly and testing units 4 — though one of those nine, the HCL-Foxconn plant at Jewar, will process 20,000 wafers a month of its own 8.
| Company | Place | Investment | What it makes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micron | Sanand, Gujarat | ₹22,516 crore | Memory assembly and testing 9 7 |
| Tata Electronics with PSMC | Dholera, Gujarat | ₹91,526 crore | India's first chip factory, 28–110 nm 10 |
| Tata Electronics | Morigaon, Assam | ₹27,120 crore | Packaging, 48 million chips a day 11 7 |
| CG Power with Renesas and Stars | Sanand, Gujarat | ₹7,584 crore | 15 million chips a day 11 7 |
| Kaynes Semicon | Sanand, Gujarat | ₹3,307 crore | About 6 million chips a day 12 7 |
| HCL with Foxconn | Jewar, Uttar Pradesh | ₹3,700 crore | Display driver chips, 20,000 wafers a month 8 |
Four more were approved in August 2025, together ₹4,600 crore: SiCSem in Bhubaneshwar (India's first commercial compound-semiconductor factory, silicon carbide), 3D Glass Solutions in Bhubaneshwar (advanced packaging), ASIP in Andhra Pradesh, and Continental Device India in Mohali (discrete chips) 13. Two more came in May 2026: Crystal Matrix in Dholera (Micro-LED displays) and Suchi Semicon in Surat 14.
Dholera is the only general-purpose logic fab: 50,000 wafers a month at 28 to 110 nanometres, with a fiscal support agreement signed in March 2025 and more than 20,000 jobs promised 10 15. Tata's Assam plant began construction by August 2024 16. Sub-town addresses are published only for the Odisha units ("Info Valley, Bhubaneshwar") and the Uttar Pradesh unit ("near Jewar airport") 13 8.
The first "made in India" chips were shown to the prime minister on 2 September 2025. They came from a pilot line, and 20 chips designed and made by Indian students were shown alongside them 17.
The first commercial plant opened on 28 February 2026: Micron's assembly and test plant at Sanand 9. At the opening, Micron says it "presented its first shipment of made-in-India memory modules to Dell Technologies" for laptops built in India 18.
Micron expects "tens of millions of chips" from Sanand in 2026, "scaling to hundreds of millions in 2027" 18. Kaynes Semicon's plant at Sanand was inaugurated on 31 March 2026, and the HCL-Foxconn plant had its groundbreaking on 21 February 2026 5.
Government counts of how many plants are producing differ: a release from SEMICON India 2026 says "03 of the 12 semiconductor projects approved under Semicon 1.0" have started commercial production, while a background note from the same month says "five units have commenced commercial production"; neither lists them 19 4. All of them are packaging and testing plants. The Dholera fab is still being built, and no government or company page we could find gives a first-chip date 15.
India rents AI computing rather than making the chips. Under the IndiaAI Mission, the government hired GPUs from Indian cloud companies and resells the time cheaply to startups, researchers and students 20.
The government published its prices. The bidding produced ₹115.85 per GPU-hour, or ₹150 for high-end chips, and a 40% government subsidy brought the price to users below ₹100 an hour, against $2.50 to $3.00 internationally, the ministry said in January 2025 20. Later published on-demand rates include ₹153 an hour for one NVIDIA H100 and ₹2,584 an hour for eight B200s 21.
The first ten providers were Jio Platforms, Tata Communications, Yotta, E2E Networks, CtrlS, NxtGen, CMS Computers, Locuz, Orient Technologies and Vensysco 20. Separately, foreign companies are building AI data centres in India: Google's $15 billion AI hub at Visakhapatnam with AdaniConneX and Airtel 23 24, Microsoft's $17.5 billion over four years 25, and AWS's ₹1,05,600 crore by 2030 26. Yotta says it will run 20,736 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs 27.
India has long designed chips for foreign companies. The government says India is home to nearly 20% of the world's chip design workforce 4. Its Design Linked Incentive scheme pays up to half the cost of designing a chip, capped at ₹15 crore 28.
By January 2026 the scheme had supported 95 companies with professional design software and sanctioned 24 chip-design projects, worth about ₹900 crore in total 4; by September 2026 the figure given was 105 startups 28 4 19. Results so far: 16 designs sent to a factory, 6 chips actually made, and more than 140 reusable design blocks 28.
The Chips to Startup programme, ₹250 crore over five years, covers hundreds of colleges; 56 student-designed chips have been made and delivered, and 211 chips have been taped out by 75 institutions, 149 of them on an older 180 nm process at Mohali 29 30. C-DAC's VEGA family of Indian-designed processors includes THEJAS64, made at Mohali on 180 nm 31; its AUM high-performance processor design, with 64 GB of HBM3 memory, was published as planned for 2024, and we found no confirmation that it has been made 32. AMD said in 2023 that its Bengaluru campus "will serve as the company's largest design center" 33.
What India does not yet have, on the government's own account:
The research pillar of Semicon 2.0 exists precisely to reach nodes beyond the 28 to 110 nanometres India is starting with, and a second pillar exists to start making the machines and chemicals that India currently imports 3. Under Semicon 2.0 the first fab is scheduled to be commissioned in 2028 34.
The nearest thing to an Indian AI chip is Netrasemi's 12 nm AI system-on-chip for cameras and drones, which the ministry describes as India's first 28. That is an edge chip, not a data-centre accelerator. For what those need, see our AI memory guide and NVIDIA guide.
India imported nearly $150 billion of semiconductors between 2016-17 and 2024-25, growing 23% a year; on that path imports would reach $240 billion a year by 2035, the government says 4. That is the case it makes for spending public money on factories 3.
India's own market was about $38 billion in 2023 and is projected at $100 to $110 billion by 2030 7. At SEMICON India 2026 the government put India's future requirement at $200 billion as the world market doubles to $2 trillion 19.
India's position is different from China's: it is not under US export restrictions and buys freely from NVIDIA and others, but it also has no advanced factory of its own. See our export rules guide for how those restrictions work, and our Huawei Ascend guide for the Chinese comparison.
Announced dates to watch:
The 2026-27 plan also targets 30 more design companies supported, 10 new Indian design blocks and 200 more design professionals 7. The talent pillar counts 315 universities and about 68,000 students already trained on professional design software 3.
The test is whether approvals become output. Three to five of twelve plants are producing, all in packaging; the fab, the display plant and the compound-semiconductor plants are still to come 4 19. A government target of about 85,000 design engineers was described by the IT secretary in September 2026 (press report of a government official) 35.
35 sources, all checked September 2026. Official = the company or organisation’s own page; Filing = a document filed with a regulator or an annual report; Standard = a published industry standard; Paper = a peer-reviewed or conference paper; Research = an independent research body; Government = a government page; Press = news coverage, used only where no official source exists.
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