Modi Pitches Chipmakers on India's $30 Billion Semiconductor Bet

Narendra Modi put a hard number on India's chip ambitions this week, and the CEOs of Micron, Intel, ASML, AMD and Foxconn all showed up to hear it: $30 billion.

Modi opened SEMICON India 2026 at the Yashobhoomi convention centre in Dwarka, New Delhi, on September 17, pitching global chipmakers on a buildout that pairs an earlier $10 billion India Semiconductor Mission fund with a fresh subsidy package worth roughly ₹1.9 trillion, or about $19.8 billion, that the government unveiled in July. Add those together and you get the figure Bloomberg used in its headline on the event: Modi is courting investors with a $30 billion chipmaking bet. He wants them to put their money on India instead of watching from the sidelines.

The day before the conference opened, Modi chaired a roundtable with executives from Micron, Infineon, Applied Materials, ASML, Merck, Tokyo Electron, Fujifilm, AMD, Intel, Tata Electronics, Lam Research, Rapidus, NXP, Foxconn, Advantest and IBM Research, among others. That's not a token guest list. It's most of the companies that actually build the machinery and materials behind the chips the AI industry is racing to secure, sharing a room with the prime minister of a country that, until recently, made almost none of it.

More than 600 companies from 52 countries are exhibiting at the three day event, the fifth edition of SEMICON India.

The scale is the message: India wants to be seen not as a market for chips, but as a place that makes them.

Here's the uncomfortable number sitting underneath the $30 billion pledge. India still imports close to 90% of the chips it uses, at a cost of roughly $30 billion a year, the same figure the government is now spending to try to build capacity at home. Nobody at SEMICON put that comparison on a slide. But it's the honest starting point for judging how far this bet has to travel.

Some of the buildout is already running, not just promised. Micron's assembly and test plant in Sanand, Gujarat, opened in February and is in production now, part of an investment of up to $2.75 billion. Tata Group and the Murugappa Group have both started chip packaging and assembly operations, the unglamorous but genuinely necessary back end of the industry. Tata is also building India's first fab, in Dholera, Gujarat, a project worth roughly ₹91,000 crore, or about $11 billion. That fab, though, opened at the 90 nanometre process node rather than the 28 nanometre node Tata originally promised back in 2024, and full commercial production isn't expected until early 2028.

Ninety nanometres is old technology, several generations behind the chips running AI data centers today. It's fine for cars and industrial electronics. It is not what wins Nvidia or AMD's most advanced orders.

Is India actually becoming a third node?

Frankly, not yet, though the direction is real. Taiwan still makes the chips that matter most to the AI boom, and the United States is racing to bring advanced fabrication home through deals like TSMC's Arizona expansion. India isn't competing with either of them on the leading edge. What it's building instead is the assembly and test and packaging layer, the unglamorous OSAT business, plus a foothold in mature node fabrication that global chipmakers want somewhere outside Taiwan and China as a hedge. That's a real, useful role, and it's the one Western companies are actually funding rather than just endorsing from a conference podium. Micron put real capital into Sanand. Applied Materials and ASML sell equipment into any fab that gets built anywhere, so their attendance is closer to a sales call than a commitment.

The number that will actually prove this bet worked isn't $30 billion. It's whether Tata's Dholera line hits its 2028 date, and whether the next fab India announces promises something sharper than 90 nanometres.

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