SEMICON 2026: India’s semiconductor moment
India has made a promising start in semiconductors. Turning that momentum into a globally competitive chip industry will demand patience and precision
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurates SEMICON India 2026 on September 17, the fifth edition of this showcase will unfold as the country’s most consequential semiconductor gathering yet - with more than 600 exhibitors, roughly 300 from abroad, six country pavilions, a dozen state pavilions and more than 150 speakers, all under the theme “Silicon to Systems”. The scale reflects genuine momentum. Whether it reflects genuine readiness is a harder question. The stakes explain the urgency. India’s chip consumption, still overwhelmingly met through imports from Taiwan, South Korea, China and the United States, is projected to more than double to around $155 billion by 2031.
Every smartphone, EV battery system and data-centre server sold in India carries an invisible import bill. Beyond economics, chips sit at the centre of strategic autonomy, defence electronics and a global supply chain actively seeking alternatives to concentration in East Asia, with hundreds of thousands of promised manufacturing jobs riding on the outcome — an opening India cannot afford to squander.
On the credit side, the ledger is genuinely encouraging. The India Semiconductor Mission, backed by $10 billion since 2021 and expanded through a Rs 1.27-lakh-crore ISM 2.0 approved this July, has moved from announcement to execution. A dozen-odd projects worth roughly `1.6 lakh crore are underway across seven states; Micron’s Sanand packaging plant is already shipping commercial output; and a design ecosystem — hundreds of universities, thousands of trained engineers and dozens of funded start-ups — gives India a genuine head start that most aspiring chip nations lack.
But the structural bottlenecks are real. India still imports over 90 per cent of the equipment and 85-90 per cent of the specialty chemicals and gases that fabs consume. Execution risk is real too: Tata Electronics’ flagship Dholera fab, once promised at the 28-nanometre node by December 2026, will now open at a far more mature 90-nanometre process in mid-2028. And talent remains the tightest constraint of all - barely 1 per cent of India’s 600,000 annual engineering graduates are fab-ready. None of this makes the dream fanciful; it makes the timeline dishonest when oversold.
Taiwan and South Korea took three decades each to reach the frontier - India’s compressed ambitions should learn from that patience, not resent it. Assembly, testing and mature-node manufacturing by 2028 is realistic; leading-edge fabrication remains a 15-year industrial project. What India needs now is infrastructure: sustained, patient capital for the equipment-and-materials layer that ISM 2.0 has only begun funding; a vocational pipeline, distinct from the design courses that already thrive; and anchor demand from government procurement in defence, railways and telecoms to de-risk early output.
SEMICON India 2026 should mark the moment the country stops selling the dream and starts building its unglamorous foundations, layer by layer.
