Chip majors eye wider ecosystem with Indian talent
Semicon India 2026 attracted huge participation from global semiconductor players looking to collaborate and expand their presence in India by leveraging skilled local talent and supportive central and state government policies.
Lithographic equipment major ASML, which has a presence only in semiconductor-producing nations, has set up an office in India and expressed optimism that more of its customers are expected to enter India.
ASML Chief Strategic Sourcing and Procurement Officer Allan Wayne said Tata Electronics is the first customer in India to have a 300-millimetre semiconductor fab with production capacity of 50,000 wafers per month.
“If we’re going to be scaling this up, we need to be able to build many fabs here. This is why we are very confident in what we see here now with the policies coming from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team for the ecosystem and, of course, the great talent that we see in India,” he said.
According to industry experts, no chip in the world gets produced without ASML equipment.
Wayne said ASML enters a region not only to support customers but to leverage talent.
“As you go on into 2032, India’s projection and India’s ambition is to have between 15 per cent and 25 per cent of the wafer fab of India’s local semiconductor demand. That means you’re going to have several fabs by 2032,” Wayne said.
The government has announced the Semicon 2.0 scheme with an incentive of around `1.27 lakh crore or $13.5 billion to build the semiconductor ecosystem.
Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said investment proposals worth USD 12 billion are likely to come under the new scheme for chip production.
Semiconductor gear maker Applied Materials committed an investment of $5 billion, about Rs 48,000 crore, over the next 10 years at the event, a day after signing a pact with the Karnataka government to invest Rs 3,600 crore in research and development and production of equipment that are used for manufacturing chips. Applied Materials’ competitor Lam Research announced an investment of Rs 10,000 crore to set up a silicon component manufacturing facility in India.
Around 56 memorandums of understanding were signed at the event.
Tata Electronics signed 16 agreements with vendors to support its Rs 1.18 lakh crore investment to set up a chip manufacturing unit in Dholera, Gujarat and a chip assembly and test unit in Assam.
The company announced the building of a 363-acre park in Dholera to house about 450 vendors that its plant will need.
The agreement brought depth to the semiconductor vendor ecosystem, ranging from partners supplying machines, materials, specialised gases, high-end logistics, etc with companies including Nexperia and BESI from Europe, JSR, Fujifilm, Sumitomo from Japan, Kelington from Malaysia, Ascendas First Space from Singapore, L&T Semiconductors, Inox Air Products, etc.
The event saw indigenous design companies like L&T Semiconductor Technologies, IndieSemiC, Axiro, and Aheesa Digital Innovations, among others, announce their plans for commercial chip production and scaling it up.
CG Semi’s subsidiary Axiro is already getting its chip produced overseas, and it is now planning for production of new chips at the semiconductor plant of its parent company.
Tata Electronics and L&T Semiconductor, IndieSemic, with Kaynes Electronics, signed a pact to produce indigenously designed and manufactured chips to serve global markets.
The government will target at least 200 startups and companies designing chips in India under the next phase of the Semicon 2.0.
The three-day event recorded more than 51,000 registrations and around 40,000 footfall, over 600 exhibitors, including participation from around 300 international companies.
Semiconductor ecosystem companies from the US, Japan, the Netherlands, Finland, Singapore, South Korea and Japan have held roundtables at the event with Indian companies, centre and state government representatives to evaluate partnership opportunities.
State governments of Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Keralam, Gujarat, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Assam, etc. were seen aggressively pitching to attract investment from overseas players at the roundtables.
