The Story
Fujifilm will invest about ₹800 crore, roughly $83 million, to build a semiconductor materials plant in the Dholera Special Investment Region in Gujarat, and has signed a memorandum of understanding with Tata Electronics to supply the fab Tata is building there.
The agreement was signed on 17 September during SEMICON India 2026. The plant will be developed in phases, with the first targeted for completion by 2028. Some Fujifilm products have already received certification from Tata Electronics for the initial phase of operations. Later phases are expected to add chemical mechanical planarisation slurries, used to polish wafers.
The partnership has a second component beyond Fujifilm's own plant. Fujifilm will provide technical support to Indian chemical manufacturers, sharing know-how in quality assurance and manufacturing processes so they can produce the high-purity chemicals chipmaking requires. The company is also evaluating an application laboratory and a local research and development centre. Its Indian team is expected to grow from about 10 people to roughly 70 over five years, supported by engineers from Japan.
Fujifilm supplies materials across the semiconductor manufacturing process, including photoresists, photolithography-related materials, CMP slurries, post-CMP cleaners, thin-film materials, polyimides sold under the ZEMATES brand, and high-purity process chemicals.
Tata Electronics is building the Dholera fab at a total investment of about ₹91,000 crore, around $11 billion, in partnership with Taiwan's Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation. The 300mm facility targets mature and legacy nodes from 28nm to 110nm, for automotive, consumer devices, data storage and AI hardware.
Fujifilm Holdings chief executive Teiichi Goto said India's expanding semiconductor market presented an opportunity to grow the company's materials business, and that its front-end and back-end portfolio could support the country's chip industry.
Why It Matters
A fab is not only a building full of machines. It is a very large, continuous consumer of chemicals.
Photoresists, developers, polishing slurries, cleaners, etchants and high-purity process chemicals are used in quantity at almost every step of making a chip. Many are hazardous to transport, some degrade over time, and all of them must arrive at extraordinary purity, since contamination at the level of a few parts per billion can ruin wafers. A fab that imports every one of these is running its production line on international shipping schedules.
That is why materials suppliers locate close to large fabs wherever chips are made, and why this announcement matters more than its size suggests. ₹800 crore is small against a ₹91,000 crore fab. But it addresses a dependency that would otherwise sit underneath the entire investment.
The certification detail is the useful signal. Some Fujifilm products have already been qualified by Tata Electronics for the initial phase of operations. Qualification in semiconductors is slow and specific: a material approved for one fab's process is not automatically approved for another's. Having products certified before the plant is built means the supply relationship is being established in parallel with construction, rather than after the fab is ready and waiting.
The 28nm to 110nm target range also matters here. These are mature nodes, where chemistry is well understood and supply chains are established elsewhere. That makes localisation more achievable than it would be for leading-edge processes.
Dr Randhir Thakur, CEO and managing director of Tata Electronics: \"Tata Electronics is committed to building a resilient, world-class semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem in India.\"
The Strategic Read
The more consequential commitment may be the one without a rupee figure attached.
Fujifilm has agreed to transfer quality assurance and process know-how to Indian chemical manufacturers, so they can produce semiconductor-grade chemicals themselves. That is unusual for a materials supplier, whose competitive position depends partly on being the qualified source. Teaching potential local suppliers to meet the same standard creates capacity that Fujifilm does not own.
The reason it makes sense is purity. Semiconductor-grade chemicals are measured in parts per billion or lower, and Indian chemical makers, many of them large and capable, have largely supplied industrial and pharmaceutical grades where tolerances are far looser. The gap between those grades is not scale. It is process control, contamination management and analytical capability. Those are learnable, but they are usually learned from a customer that insists on them.
If the transfer works, the beneficiaries are established Indian chemical companies rather than startups, since producing high-purity chemicals needs plants, regulatory approvals and existing process expertise. That broadens who gains from India's semiconductor push beyond the handful of firms building fabs and designing chips.
The honest constraint is volume. One fab, even an $11 billion one, consumes a limited quantity of any given chemical. Local suppliers will find it hard to justify semiconductor-grade investment against a single customer, which is why the long-term case depends on further fabs following Tata's to Dholera or elsewhere. Materials ecosystems form around clusters of demand.
Fujifilm's timing reflects that bet. Committing ₹800 crore before the fab is producing means being established, qualified and trusted by the time the next fab arrives, rather than competing to enter afterwards.
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