India’s semiconductor programme has moved from promises to production lines, with five chip projects now in commercial production and selling into global markets, government officials said at SEMICON India 2026 in New Delhi this week. The event, running through September 19 at Yashobhoomi, drew more than 600 exhibitors from over 40 countries and opened with roughly 1 lakh crore rupees, about $12 billion, in fresh investment commitments and 16 signed agreements.
The framing from the government side was blunt. Officials including semiconductor mission leadership told attendees that facilities already in commercial production are competing for global customers and that capacity is being taken up, a noticeable change in tone from previous editions of the show, which were heavy on incentives and light on shipped silicon. Day 2 coverage by Livemint described the shift as one from semiconductor policy to commercial production, and the exhibition floor backed the claim up with working samples rather than concept models.
What is actually running
The producing facilities are mostly assembly, test and packaging plants rather than leading-edge wafer fabs, but they are real operations with real customers. Micron’s $2.75 billion OSAT facility in Sanand, Gujarat, began volume production in late 2025 and packages and tests DRAM and NAND memory, targeting data center, automotive and consumer applications. At full ramp it is sized for roughly 450,000 wafer starts per month equivalent of test and packaging throughput. Tata Electronics’ assembly and test plant in Jagiroad, Assam is operational for mature-node packaging, handling wafer bumping, flip-chip packaging and test for logic chips and display drivers.
CG Power’s automotive-focused facility is also producing, and at the show, Suchi Semicon and eInfochips exchanged their first batch of commercial devices, while CDIL Semiconductors announced commercial production of discrete components alongside a package development partnership with Japan’s Shindengen Electric. None of this is 3nm logic, and none of it pretends to be. It is the volume packaging and discrete work that anchors a supply chain before wafer fabs arrive, and it employs the technicians and process engineers a later fab will need.
The big fab is still coming. Tata’s greenfield wafer fabrication plant at Dholera in Gujarat, built with Taiwan’s PSMC at a planned investment of 91,526 crore rupees, is under construction with first silicon expected in 2026 or 2027. Tata said at the event it has assembled more than 450 ecosystem partners for the Dholera project across construction, equipment, chemicals and materials, and signed 16 agreements to strengthen the supply chain, including an MoU with Nexperia covering wafer manufacturing, assembly, testing and technology collaboration.
The money and the partners
India’s approved programme now counts ten projects with commitments of about 1.6 lakh crore rupees. The incentive model pairs central government support with state-level packages, and the results so far have favored packaging and test first, which is the standard sequencing for a new chipmaking country: build the back end, learn the logistics, then attempt the front end. Micron’s Sanand investment alone is 22,516 crore rupees, and the Tata plants in Gujarat and Assam account for another 118,000 crore combined.
ASML’s presence at the show was read as a signal in itself. The Dutch lithography monopoly has little to sell India’s packaging plants and every reason to cultivate the next generation of fabs, and its executives publicly emphasized growing confidence in India’s buildout. Micron, Tata and Infineon all used the event to outline next expansion steps, according to Times of India coverage.
Why it matters for the global chip map
Every major electronics manufacturing country followed a similar path, and the bottleneck has always been the same: packaging plants are easy to justify economically, wafer fabs are not, because they need deep engineering talent, reliable ultra-pure water and power, and a customer base willing to qualify a brand-new supplier. India is now at the transition point where the packaging base exists and the first fab is finishing construction.
For chip buyers, the near-term effect is modest. Indian packaging capacity adds a second source for mature-node assembly and test, useful for supply chain diversification at a time when export controls keep pushing companies to split production across borders. The memory packaging at Sanand plugs directly into the global DRAM and NAND logistics that Micron already runs, and Assam’s plant gives display driver and automotive customers an alternative to Southeast Asian concentration.
For the crypto and AI hardware markets that dominate chip demand headlines, India’s role remains peripheral for now. The country is not building leading-edge logic or advanced AI accelerators this decade, and its fabs will serve automotive, industrial and consumer chips. But the same could have been said about South Korea in 1985 and Taiwan in 1990. The government’s own programme documents make clear the ambition runs past packaging, and the 2026 show was the first where the domestic industry could point at running plants instead of renderings.
There are honest caveats. Talent is the binding constraint: fab-grade process engineers take years to train, and India’s best chip designers have historically emigrated to Austin, Hsinchu and Santa Clara. Water and grid reliability at Dholera scale remain open engineering questions. And qualifying a new fab’s output with global customers typically takes a year or more after first silicon, which means revenue lags the ribbon cutting.
The test of the week’s announcements will be execution at Dholera. First silicon from the Tata-PSMC fab, expected within roughly a year, is the milestone that separates India from every other country that has announced a semiconductor mission and stalled at the packaging stage.