Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: A goal India has chased for four decades is now measured in months rather than years. Tata Electronics, in partnership with Taiwan’s Powerchip, is targeting first silicon from its 300-mm wafer fabrication plant at Dholera in Gujarat by the end of this year — the first time chips will be fabricated at commercial scale on Indian soil. It is the centrepiece of a semiconductor push that has drawn more than $21 billion in approved investment and turned a stretch of Gujarat into the country’s emerging chip hub.
The foundations are already operational. Micron’s assembly, test and packaging facility at Sanand, inaugurated earlier this year, has begun putting through chips and is expected to handle tens of millions of units in 2026, scaling into the hundreds of millions as lines ramp. Around it, packaging and test units from CG Power, Kaynes and others are taking shape, so that a genuine cluster — fabrication, packaging, testing and the suppliers that feed them — is forming in one place rather than as scattered announcements.
The first Indian-made chip will not be the most advanced in the world. It will be the most important one India has made — proof that the country can build where it once only bought.
What makes chips strategic is the same thing that makes them hard: they sit inside almost everything modern — phones, cars, medical devices, defence systems, the power grid — so making them at home is as much about resilience as about industry. The learning curve is steep, and India is starting with mature, high-demand nodes rather than the bleeding edge, which is the sensible way to build capability, yield and a skilled workforce before reaching for the frontier.
The constructive read is that India is doing the patient, unglamorous work a chip industry actually requires — securing partners with real fabrication know-how, co-investing with the states, and training the technicians and engineers the lines will need. The way forward is to hold that steadiness: convert the first wafers into reliable yield, deepen the domestic supplier base, and let each node mastered become the platform for the next. The destination is a country that designs and builds its own silicon — and the road there now runs through Gujarat.
