India’s Semiconductor Mission has moved from announcements to actual output — just not the kind most people picture when they hear “chip fab.” A “fab” (short for fabrication plant) is where raw silicon is actually turned into a working chip, cut from a large wafer through hundreds of precision manufacturing steps. That’s different from “packaging and testing,” where an already-made chip is assembled into the casing that goes onto a circuit board, and checked for defects before it ships. Both matter, but the fab is the harder, far more expensive part to build — and the part that actually determines whether a country can genuinely call itself a chipmaker.
Of the 12 semiconductor units India has approved so far, three are already producing and shipping commercial product. Micron’s plant in Sanand, Gujarat, has been shipping memory chips — DRAM and NAND, the kind used in phones, laptops and servers — since it was formally opened in February 2026. Kaynes Semicon’s packaging plant, also in Sanand, sent India’s first commercially made chip module to a buyer in California back in October 2025. And CG Semi runs a packaging unit as well. Two more of the 12 have now been named specifically: Crystal Matrix, a ₹3,068 crore facility in Dholera building components for mini and micro-LED display screens, and Suchi Semicon, an ₹868 crore packaging plant in Surat capable of producing over a billion chips a year. Total investment across all 12 approved units comes to roughly ₹1.64 lakh crore, or about $17-18 billion.
But none of these three currently-running plants are fabs. The one true fab — the plant that will actually manufacture chips from raw silicon inside India — is Tata Electronics’ partnership with Taiwan’s PSMC, under construction in Dholera. It has already been scaled back once: it will start production at the 90-nanometre level, an older and simpler chip standard used in things like car electronics and basic sensors, rather than the more advanced 28-nanometre standard Tata originally promised in 2024. Trial production is targeted for December 2026; real commercial output isn’t expected until mid-2028.
To fund the next stage, the government approved a new ₹1.275 lakh crore package — about $13 billion — called Semicon 2.0 on July 15, 2026, aimed squarely at the gaps the first phase didn’t close: more fabs, the specialised machines and materials that feed them, and the trained workforce to run them.
The plain takeaway: India has built the easier half of a semiconductor industry — assembling and testing chips made elsewhere — faster than the harder half of actually manufacturing them from scratch. The one plant that would change that is still two years away, and starting smaller than originally promised.
Sources:
- PIB via Drishti IAS (Feb 10, 2026)Business Standard (Jul 15, 2026; Jul 22, 2026 — Semicon 1.0 vs 2.0 explainer)
- Free Press Journal
- The Federal
- TechTimes (Aug 2, 2026; Jul 17, 2026)
- DD News, “Cabinet Clears Two New Semiconductor Units Worth ₹3,936 Crore in Gujarat” (May 5, 2026)
- Newkerala / Prokerala, “Gujarat secures half of India’s semiconductor projects” (May 2026)
