India’s semiconductor build-out moved further along in August, with Tata Electronics, Micron Technology and the HCL-Foxconn joint venture all advancing separate fabrication and packaging projects as the government widened the incentive envelope under the India Semiconductor Mission. Since December 2021, that mission has aimed to capture a share of the chip investment moving out of China as manufacturers diversify their supply base, and this month’s advances extend the same strategy.
Tata Electronics’ fab in Dholera, Gujarat — a joint venture with Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation — remains the anchor project, with committed investment near $11 billion for a facility designed to produce chips for power management, display drivers and automotive applications at 28-nanometre and above. Through the year, equipment installation at the site has continued, with the company targeting initial wafer output before the close of 2027 — a timeline it has held to publicly since construction began.
Micron’s Sanand plant adds a second phase
Micron’s assembly, test, marking and packaging plant in Sanand is running ahead of the fab in operational terms. Shipping commercially since 2025, the facility has already moved toward a second expansion phase, part of a total project cost of roughly $2.75 billion split between Micron and central and state government incentives. Sanand packages DRAM and NAND components sourced from Micron’s fabs in Taiwan, Japan and Singapore, positioning India as an assembly and test node rather than a leading-edge fabrication centre — a distinction the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has been explicit about in its public messaging.
Roughly ₹76,000 crore (about $9 billion) was the mission’s initial outlay when it launched, covering up to 50% of capital expenditure for fabs and a similar share for assembly, test, marking and packaging projects, with states such as Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh layering additional land, power and duty concessions on top of the central subsidy. But the government has said it is prepared to widen that envelope for a second wave of applicants, a signal read in the industry as an attempt to keep pace with subsidy competition from Malaysia, Vietnam and Japan.
HCL-Foxconn’s Jewar plant targets a narrower niche
The HCL Group and Foxconn joint venture in Jewar, Uttar Pradesh, occupies a smaller but strategically distinct slot in the build-out. Sited near the new Noida International Airport, the plant is being built as an outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) facility focused on display driver chips, with a construction cost of roughly ₹3,700 crore (close to $440 million) and equipment sourced from Foxconn’s existing OSAT operations elsewhere in Asia. Unlike the Dholera and Sanand projects, Jewar is aimed squarely at India’s domestic electronics assembly base — the same smartphone and consumer-electronics supply chain Foxconn has been expanding independently through its assembly plants in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
The three projects together illustrate the shape India’s semiconductor strategy has settled into: a single leading fab anchored by a foreign technology partner, a packaging and test layer built around established memory and logic suppliers, and a narrower OSAT segment tied to domestic electronics demand. None of the three approaches the scale of TSMC’s or Samsung’s leading-edge nodes, and officials at the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology have consistently framed the mission’s first phase as building assembly and mature-node capacity rather than competing at the 3-nanometre frontier.
Set against the wider China+1 shift
The India build-out sits inside a broader reallocation of electronics manufacturing capacity that has been under way since tariff and supply-chain disruptions pushed multinational manufacturers to diversify production locations beyond China. Diversifying beyond a single China-based supply chain, multinationals — Apple’s assembly partners, memory suppliers and now chip packagers — have each treated India as one leg of that shift rather than a wholesale relocation, a pattern consistent with the scale of the three projects moving forward this year. Vietnam and Malaysia remain ahead of India on assembly and test volumes for now, and the Dholera fab’s 2027 output target leaves India’s first domestically produced chips still more than a year away.