On 15 July 2026, the Union Cabinet cleared Semicon 2.0 with an outlay of Rs 1,27,500 crore (roughly $13 billion) as part of a wider package of decisions worth some Rs 2.19 lakh crore that also included a Rs 62,500 crore Mobile Phone Manufacturing Scheme.
In approving it, the government did something more consequential than write another cheque: it signalled that India's chip ambition has graduated from a proof-of-concept into a structural project that will ultimately be judged by how much of a semiconductor's value it can actually claim.
To understand why the second act builds logically on the first, it helps to be honest about what the first achieved. Under ISM 1.0, twelve manufacturing units were approved, mobilising cumulative investment north of Rs 1.64 lakh crore.
Three companies—Micron, Kaynes and CG Semi—have begun commercial production, with a fourth expected to follow within 2026. On the design side, 24 projects have won financial support, 105 start-ups have been given access to expensive industry-standard EDA tools, and some 68,000 students across 315 universities have been trained. For a country that made no chips at scale five years ago, this is a real beginning.
But if one looks closely at the composition of that success, the strategic logic of Semicon 2.0 comes into focus. Of the twelve approved units, nine were packaging plants; the rest comprised a single silicon fab, one silicon-carbide fab and one integrated gallium-nitride Micro LED display fab.
India's early foothold, in other words, clustered at the lower-value-added end of the chain like assembly, test and packaging, the ATMP/OSAT layer where entry barriers are lower and payback quicker. That was the sensible way to start. It is not, however, where the economic and strategic prizes sit.