Twelve plants approved, three producing: India's chip mission meets its first real deadline
First silicon from the Tata–PSMC fab at Dholera is targeted for December 2026. Everything else approved so far is packaging.
As of July 2026, India had approved twelve semiconductor manufacturing units with cumulative investment above ₹1.64 lakh crore. Commercial production has begun at three of them — Micron, CG Semi and Kaynes.
Micron’s Sanand facility in Gujarat was inaugurated on 28 February 2026. Kaynes Semicon’s OSAT plant followed on 31 March, with investment of about ₹33 billion and capacity around six million chips per day.
Those are real plants producing real output. They are also, with one exception, not doing the thing the mission was created to do.
Fabs and packaging are not the same industry
Of the twelve approved units, one is a silicon fab, one a silicon carbide fab, one an integrated gallium nitride micro-LED display fab, and nine are packaging units.
Packaging — assembly, test, marking and packaging, or OSAT — is the back end of chip production. It takes finished wafers and turns them into usable components. It is genuinely valuable, employs substantial numbers, and is the sensible place for a new entrant to start.
It is not fabrication. A country with nine packaging plants and no operating fab still imports every wafer it packages.
December 2026
The milestone that determines whether the mission has met its central objective is the Tata–PSMC fab at Dholera: a 300mm facility targeting 50,000 wafer starts per month at 28nm to 110nm process nodes, at a total investment around ₹91,000 crore. First silicon is targeted for December 2026, on a timeline confirmed by Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
The nodes are worth understanding. 28nm to 110nm is not leading edge — that is 3nm and below, at TSMC and Samsung. It is instead the mature-node range that supplies automotive, industrial, power management and display driver chips: the segment that caused the 2021 shortage, and the segment where demand is durable and competition is on cost and reliability rather than on process leadership.
Starting there is the correct strategy. It is what China, and before it Taiwan, did.
The design side
Twenty-four semiconductor design projects from start-ups and MSMEs have been approved for financial support, and 105 start-ups and MSMEs have been granted access to industry-standard EDA tools.
EDA access is a larger intervention than it appears. Design software licences cost more than most Indian start-ups can raise, and their absence has been a quiet barrier to entry for decades.
Where Andhra Pradesh fits
The state has approved units within the national programme, and is positioning Kurnool around the proposed ₹22,976 crore Indichip Semiconductors project, with manufacturing zones at Sri City, Naidupeta, Kopparthy and Visakhapatnam.
None of that is operating yet. Andhra Pradesh’s semiconductor story is currently a policy and a set of sites, while Gujarat’s is a plant that was inaugurated in February.
The test
December 2026. If wafers come out of Dholera on schedule, India has a fab industry to build on. If the date moves — as fab dates very often do — the mission is where it was: a strong packaging sector and a fab under construction.