India’s semiconductor push

India has moved from semiconductor policy to construction, with Micron opening a chip assembly-and-test plant in Gujarat and Tata advancing a fabrication plant and a second packaging unit. (micron.com) (pib.gov.in) Semiconductors are the tiny circuits inside phones, cars and servers, and countries make them in stages: fabrication prints patterns onto wafers, while assembly, test and packaging turns those wafers into finished chips. India’s current buildout spans both steps, with Micron in Sanand handling memory assembly and test and Tata Electronics planning a full fab in Dholera with Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (investindia.gov.in) (pib.gov.in) Micron said on February 28, 2026 that it had opened its Sanand facility, calling it India’s first semiconductor assembly and test site. The company said phase one will have more than 500,000 square feet of cleanroom space and will convert imported dynamic random-access memory and NAND wafers into finished memory and storage products. (micron.com) The Indian government approved Micron’s project in June 2023 with capital investment of ₹22,516 crore, or about $2.75 billion, and said New Delhi would provide 50% fiscal support on a pari-passu basis. Groundbreaking followed in September 2023, and the government said commercial operations were expected by February 2026. (pib.gov.in) (gsem.gujarat.gov.in) New Delhi widened the push in February 2024, when the cabinet approved three more semiconductor units under a ₹76,000 crore program launched in December 2021. The list included Tata Electronics’ ₹91,000 crore fab in Dholera, Tata’s ₹27,000 crore assembly-and-test plant in Jagiroad, Assam, and a packaging unit in Sanand led by CG Power. (pib.gov.in 1) (pib.gov.in 2) The Dholera project is the most ambitious piece because a fab is the step that actually manufactures chips on silicon wafers. The government said Tata’s plant, built with Powerchip, is designed for 50,000 wafer starts per month and will make chips for power management, display drivers, microcontrollers and high-performance computing. (pib.gov.in 1) (pib.gov.in 2) Tata’s fab moved from approval to funding paperwork in March 2025, when India Semiconductor Mission signed a fiscal support agreement for a project the government valued at ₹91,526 crore. That agreement locked in the subsidy framework and marked the handoff from cabinet approval to execution. (pib.gov.in) The Assam unit covers the back end of the supply chain, where chips are packaged and tested before shipment. Assam’s investment portal says the Jagiroad plant carries a ₹27,000 crore investment plan, is expected to produce 48 million chips a day and was slated to begin partial operations in 2025. (eodb.assam.gov.in) India is also trying to build the surrounding supplier base, not just the headline plants. Invest India said in February 2026 that the semiconductor strategy now ties fabs and outsourced semiconductor assembly and test units to incentives for electronic components, design, research and workforce training. (investindia.gov.in) That sequencing helps explain why advisory firms are talking about capital expenditure planning, subsidy structuring and supply-chain risk: these projects require land, power, water, imported tools, customers and local vendors to line up at the same time. India’s semiconductor story in 2026 is less about a single factory than about whether these linked projects can move from inauguration and agreements to steady output. (meity.gov.in) (investindia.gov.in)