India Wins Large Chip Investment Pledges

Investment Pledges

India has pulled in close to one lakh crore rupees in investment pledges from local and global investors since launching the Semicon 2.0 policy. Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw shared these details with the press at the Semicon India 2026 event. He explained that while the first phase, Semicon 1.0, set up the basic groundwork for the semiconductor sector, the second phase aims to grow the full ecosystem and expand capacity across the entire value chain.

Policy Pillars

Semicon 2.0 has a total government outlay of 1.27 lakh crore rupees, following its approval by the Cabinet in July. The policy rests on six core pillars which include design, machinery and materials, fabrication plants, advanced packaging, research and development, and skills development. Under the design pillar, the government wants to back 200 chip design start-ups, up from the 105 supported in the first phase. Twenty of these start-ups have already secured venture capital funding. The machinery and materials part of the plan focuses on building local supply for manufacturing equipment and inputs, while the fabrication pillar covers display, memory, silicon, compound, and logic manufacturing.

Training And Growth

For workforce training, about 400 universities and institutions now offer chip-design training. The government plans to train one lakh technicians over five years, working partly with outside groups like Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute. Vaishnaw pointed out that the goal is to build a complete supply chain that includes domestic capability in capital equipment, materials, gases, chemicals, and precision manufacturing, rather than just setting up isolated production sites. Companies are expected to finish board and shareholder approvals over the next two to three years as these commitments start taking shape. The event also featured 11 memorandums of understanding and five new announcements covering manufacturing, packaging, materials, equipment, design, and skills training.