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Timeline of India's semiconductor push
This page lays out the timeline of India's semiconductor push in plain, dated steps, from the launch of the India Semiconductor Mission through the approvals at Sanand and Dholera to the targets ahead. It uses only verified dates and labels targets as targets so the sequence stays accurate.
Last checked 2026-08-11 · every figure below carries its source
The starting point: 2021 and the mission
India's current semiconductor effort has a clear starting marker in 2021, when the India Semiconductor Mission was launched with an outlay of about Rs 76,000 crore. The mission was designed to attract fabrication, packaging, and related investment by offering fiscal support of up to 50 percent of eligible project cost for approved fabs. This was significant because India had long designed chips and supplied engineering talent to the global industry but had no commercial wafer fabrication of its own. The mission set the policy framework and the financial incentives that later approvals would draw on. It is worth understanding what this launch did and did not do. It created the mechanism and the money to support projects, but it did not, by itself, build any facility. The years that followed were about converting that framework into concrete, approved projects. Seen in sequence, 2021 is best read as the foundation year, the moment India committed public resources and a structured programme to building domestic capacity, setting up the approvals and construction milestones that came afterward rather than delivering production on its own.
Early approvals and a false start
The period after the mission's launch brought both progress and a notable setback. In September 2022, Vedanta and Foxconn announced a memorandum of understanding for a large semiconductor project valued at around US$19.5 billion. This drew significant attention, but the plant was never built, and Foxconn withdrew from the arrangement on 10 July 2023. It should therefore be remembered as an announcement that did not materialise, not as a committed facility. Alongside that false start came real movement. In 2023, Micron's assembly, test, and packaging plant at Sanand in Gujarat was approved under the India Semiconductor Mission. This was a back-end packaging and test project rather than a wafer fab, but it was a concrete, approved investment and an early sign that the mission's incentives were attracting activity. The contrast between the Vedanta and Foxconn withdrawal and the Micron approval captures the mixed nature of this phase: high-profile ambition that fell through in one case, and steadier back-end progress in another. Reading the two together prevents both overstatement and dismissal of India's early momentum.
The fab milestone: 2024
The pivotal fabrication milestone came on 29 February 2024, when the Union Cabinet approved the Tata Electronics and PSMC wafer fab at Dholera in Gujarat under the India Semiconductor Mission. This is India's first commercial wafer fab under construction. PSMC, Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation of Taiwan, is the technology partner. The reported investment is about Rs 91,000 crore, roughly US$11 billion, with the Press Information Bureau citing Rs 91,526 crore. The plan describes a 300mm fab with capacity of up to 50,000 wafers per month, targeting mature and specialty nodes such as 28, 40, 55, 90, and 110 nanometres rather than leading-edge nodes, with an ASML lithography partnership confirmed. This approval mattered because it moved India from packaging-only progress toward actual front-end fabrication, the hardest stage to establish. It is the anchor around which the rest of the fabrication timeline is organised. As with the earlier steps, precision helps: the 2024 date is an approval and the start of construction, not the start of production, which lies further ahead on the timeline.
Recent steps and the road ahead
The timeline continued to develop through 2026. Two further Gujarat semiconductor units were approved on 5 May 2026, one at Dholera and one at Surat, together worth over Rs 3,900 crore and expected to create over 2,200 jobs, though those figures are still settling. Supporting infrastructure also advanced: the Ahmedabad to Dholera Expressway became operational on 31 March 2026, the Dholera airport recorded a first trial landing on 4 June 2026 with an opening targeted for around September to October 2026, and a semi-high-speed rail link was reported by the Press Information Bureau on 13 May 2026 at about Rs 20,667 crore for roughly 134 kilometres, targeted for 2030 to 2031. Looking ahead, the Dholera fab has a target of first silicon around December 2026 and commercial production reported for the middle of 2028. As of now, no chip has been produced. India-wide, there are around a dozen sanctioned semiconductor projects with a cumulative value on the order of Rs 1.64 lakh crore, a national total that spans many sites. The realistic reading is steady, incentive-backed progress with the most important production milestones still ahead and labelled as targets.