The fight over who makes the world’s chips is increasingly a fight over the parts of a chip nobody photographs. India has just landed one of them.
Intel and 3D Glass Solutions have signed an agreement to build a roughly $3.3 billion substrate-manufacturing plant in the eastern state of Odisha, the government announced on Friday.
The memorandum of understanding, signed between the Odisha government, Intel Corporation and 3DGS Inc., covers an advanced-packaging glass-core substrate facility in the Bhubaneswar-Khurda region, to be built over five to six years.
India’s electronics and IT minister, Ashwini Vaishnaw, framed it as one of the largest high-technology manufacturing commitments the country has secured.
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Substrates are the unglamorous layer that makes modern chips work. They are the engineered base a processor is mounted on, routing power and signals between the silicon and the circuit board, and as chipmakers hit the limits of shrinking transistors, the packaging around the silicon has become where much of the performance gain now lives.
Glass-core substrates, the technology at the centre of this plant, are seen as a leap over today’s organic materials, offering tighter, faster interconnections for the densest designs.
The plant’s output targets reflect that ambition. According to the government, it is expected to produce around 70,000 glass substrates a year, some 50 million assembled units, and close to 13,000 advanced 3D heterogeneous-integration modules, the stacked, multi-die packages that pack several chips into one.
It is also expected to create more than 1,800 direct high-skilled jobs, with wider indirect employment around it.
The deal does not stand alone. It was approved under the India Semiconductor Mission, the programme through which New Delhi has pledged billions in subsidies to pull chip manufacturing onshore, and the official project cost is put at about ₹1,943 crore, with central fiscal support of roughly ₹799 crore and additional state backing.
The subsidy structure is the mechanism: India is buying its way into a supply chain it has historically had to import.
For Intel, the move is a smaller, sharper bet than a full fabrication plant, and a notable one given the company’s wider retrenchment.
Backing a substrate facility lets it plant a manufacturing flag in a fast-growing market and in a part of the stack, advanced packaging, where it has staked much of its technological case, without the tens of billions a leading-edge fab would demand.
The strategic logic is the same one driving chip policy from Brussels to Washington. The EU’s Chips Act and the US CHIPS Act are both attempts to localise a supply chain that the pandemic and geopolitics exposed as dangerously concentrated, and India is now running the same playbook from further behind.
An MoU is a starting line, not a finished plant, and the five-to-six-year horizon leaves room for the usual slippage. But the direction is unmistakable: the map of where chips, and the things chips sit on, get made is being redrawn, and Odisha has just been added to it.
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