Five of India's 12 Approved Chip Plants Are Now Running, but All Five Package Chips and the First Fab Is Due in 2028

On 17 September 2026 the government counted 12 semiconductor plants approved under the India Semiconductor Mission, with investment of more than Rs 1.64 lakh crore, and five of them in commercial production. The Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s release service, calls all five assembly, test and packaging units. The programme’s one silicon fab, Tata Electronics’ plant at Dholera in Gujarat, is not among them, and a PIB release of 15 July 2026 says the first fab is scheduled to be commissioned in 2028.

The two kinds of plant do different jobs. A fab (fabrication plant) prints circuits onto silicon wafers. An ATMP or OSAT plant (assembly, testing, marking and packaging, or outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) takes finished circuits, mounts them in protective packages and tests them. The Dholera fab alone is listed at Rs 91,526 crore, more than half of the programme’s total.

What the programme pays, and why the figures differ

The Semicon India programme, notified on 21 December 2021, started with an outlay of Rs 76,000 crore. The mission’s own page says it offers 50 percent fiscal support on a pari passu basis, meaning the government pays its half in step with the company’s own spending. Micron’s 2023 announcement adds a second layer: Gujarat gives incentives equal to 20 percent of the total project cost on top of the Centre’s 50 percent. The cabinet notices state each plant’s investment but not the rupee value of its subsidy, so this article gives none.

Investment figures also move between documents. On 29 February 2024 the cabinet approved Dholera at Rs 91,000 crore, the Assam plant at Rs 27,000 crore and CG Semi at Rs 7,600 crore. A Lok Sabha reply of 1 April 2026, published by PIB, gives Rs 91,526 crore, Rs 27,120 crore and Rs 7,584 crore. The table below uses the later figures.

On 15 July 2026 the cabinet approved a second phase, Semicon 2.0, with an outlay of Rs 1,27,500 crore.

Twelve approvals, five producing

The HCL and Foxconn row follows the Lok Sabha reply, which lists a display driver unit in Uttar Pradesh under Vama Sundari Investments (Delhi) with Foxconn as partner, at the same 20,000 wafers a month that the May 2025 cabinet notice gives for HCL and Foxconn.

The five that are shipping

Micron’s Sanand plant was the first project approved. The company opened it on 28 February 2026 and handed Dell Technologies a first batch of memory modules for laptops “made in India for India”. It converts DRAM and NAND wafers from Micron’s global manufacturing network into finished memory and storage products. Micron said in June 2023 that operations would start in late 2024. It now expects to assemble and test tens of millions of chips there in 2026 and hundreds of millions in 2027, and the Lok Sabha reply puts capacity at about 14 million units a week.

Kaynes Semicon, approved on 2 September 2024, began commercial production in March 2026 according to the mission’s timeline. CG Semi is a CG Power venture with Renesas of Japan and Stars Microelectronics of Thailand. Its first building, called G1, opened as a pilot line on 28 August 2025 with a peak of about 0.5 million units a day, and a second building is due by the end of 2026 to reach about 14.5 million a day, according to PIB. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the plant on 4 July 2026 he said it could deliver 20 crore units a year and voiced confidence in a target of 500 crore.

On 17 September 2026 Modi launched production lines at CDIL in Mohali, which makes power devices such as MOSFETs and diodes, and at Suchi Semicon in Surat. PIB counts them with Micron, Kaynes and CG Semi as the five operating units. Suchi was approved on 5 May 2026.

Which made in India chip came first

The answer depends on who is counting, and five dates compete. Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw inaugurated CG’s pilot line on 28 August 2025, and its chips were meant for customer qualification. Five days later he presented the first set of “Made-in-India chips from a pilot line” to the Prime Minister, PIB’s wording. Kaynes shipped 900 intelligent power modules to the US firm Alpha & Omega Semiconductor on 15 October 2025 and called them India’s first commercially manufactured multi-chip modules, a claim that comes from the company’s own filing. Micron followed on 28 February 2026 with its first commercial shipment.

The fifth claim came on 17 September 2026, when PIB listed “India’s first commercial QFN chip” by Suchi Semicon and eInfochips among that day’s announcements. In every case the chip was assembled and packaged in India. Micron’s release says its wafers come from its global manufacturing network. None of the three fabs on the approved list is producing yet. India does have a government laboratory, the Semi-Conductor Laboratory in Mohali, which had fabricated 20 student-designed chips by August 2025.

Dholera, and the process node that moved

The Dholera fab was approved on 29 February 2024 with PSMC (Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp) of Taiwan as technology partner, for 50,000 wafer starts a month. The cabinet notice named high performance compute chips on 28 nanometre technology and power management chips as its products. A node, in chip talk, is a generation of manufacturing process named in nanometres, and a smaller number is a newer process.

On 17 July 2026 Bloomberg reported, citing people it did not name, that the fab would run mainly on 90 nanometre technology. A Tata Electronics spokesperson replied that the plan had always been to start with 55 and 90 nanometres and then add 28, and the company describes the fab’s range as 28 to 110 nanometres, according to Outlook Business and TrendForce. TrendForce notes that the Tata Sons annual report for the year to March 2025 had identified 28 nanometres. PSMC spokesperson Eric Tang said technology transfers usually begin with more mature nodes and that 28 is the most advanced node in the licence.

The date moved as well. TrendForce says Tata had earlier targeted commercial production by the end of 2026 and reports that Vaishnaw said it is now expected in mid-2028. We found no published date for 28 nanometre output. PIB’s Semicon 2.0 notice of 15 July says only that the first fab is scheduled to be commissioned in 2028.

What is still unbuilt

Tata’s assembly plant at Jagiroad is the nearest of the unfinished large projects. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said on 3 October 2026 that the first cleanroom was ready and pilot chips were being made, Autocar Professional reported, and a formal inauguration by the Prime Minister is expected in December 2026 or January 2027. The plant is designed for up to 48 million units a day.

The HCL and Foxconn unit near Jewar broke ground in February 2026 and is designed for 20,000 wafers and 36 million units a month. The 3D Glass Solutions packaging plant in Bhubaneswar broke ground in April 2026, and the silicon carbide fab in the same Info Valley park, which PIB called the country’s first commercial compound fab, signed its support agreement in May 2026. The gallium nitride display fab at Dholera, approved on 5 May 2026, has no stated start date, and the Rs 3,936 crore figure covers it and Suchi Semicon together.

The most advanced process named for any approved fab is 28 nanometres. The Semicon 2.0 notice says the research pillar will now work on more advanced nodes with centres in India and abroad. The government’s AI compute programme rents tens of thousands of GPUs to startups, as our piece on Indian-language AI describes. Advanced semiconductors are among the components India’s defence industry still imports.

Dr Randhir Thakur, chief executive of Tata Electronics, told the SEMICON India 2026 audience on 17 September that construction of the Dholera fab and the Jagiroad plant is on track, PIB reported. The same release says Applied Materials plans a $5 billion investment in India over the next decade and Lam Research about Rs 10,000 crore for a silicon-component plant.