Blitz Bureau
India’s semiconductor ambition is passing a quiet but telling milestone. At Dholera in Gujarat, the Tata–PSMC fabrication plant — the country’s first full-scale chip fab — has crossed the halfway mark in construction, with foundations complete and the hardest phases, cleanroom installation and equipment calibration, now under way ahead of trial production targeted for December 2026.
The fab is the centrepiece of a wider build-out. Assembly-and-test plants that package and test finished chips are already operational — Micron and CG Semi at Sanand, and Tata Electronics at Jagiroad in Assam — while the ₹91,000 crore Dholera line, designed for 50,000 wafers a month starting at the 28-nanometre node, has secured advanced lithography tools from the Dutch supplier ASML. Together, projects worth more than $21 billion have been approved under the India Semiconductor Mission.
A chip ecosystem is built brick by brick — packaging first, fabrication next — and India has now laid several of those bricks on the ground.
At a Glance
- Dholera fab: Past 50% built; trial output targeted Dec 2026
- Scale: ₹91,000 cr; 50,000 wafers/month; 28nm start
- OSAT live: Micron & CG Semi (Sanand); Tata (Jagiroad)
- Backing: $21 bn+ approved under the Semiconductor Mission
The strategic logic is plain: semiconductors sit inside everything from phones and cars to power grids and defence systems, and a domestic base reduces reliance on a handful of overseas suppliers. Packaging and testing came first because they are less capital-intensive and quicker to scale; fabrication, the most complex step, follows as skills, ultra-clean power and supplier networks mature around the new clusters.
The constructive task now is execution — converting cleanrooms into steady, high-yield output, training thousands of technicians and deepening the local supplier chain. Hold to the Dholera timeline and the fundamentals around it, and a mission that began as an aspiration becomes a durable industry that employs, exports and secures the technologies India’s growth increasingly runs on.
