The answer desk

How big is the Dholera fab?

Published 25 August 2026. Facts verified to 25 August 2026 unless dated otherwise.

The Dholera fab is a Rs 91,000 crore project, with the Fiscal Support Agreement of 5 March 2025 citing Rs 91,526 crore. Design capacity is up to 50,000 wafer starts a month on 300mm wafers at 28 to 110nm. The Tata Semiconductor special economic zone notified around April 2026 covers 66.16 hectares, roughly 163 acres. Employment figures of about 21,000 and more than 20,000 direct and indirect are cited but unreconciled. Cleanroom area, building footprint and tool count have not been published.

Four numbers, four different questions

How big is the Dholera fab depends entirely on which kind of size you mean, and the four answers do not scale together. A plant can be enormous in capital and modest in land, or large in wafer capacity and small in headcount, because a modern fab is a machine for converting money and physics into throughput rather than a factory in the older sense. This page takes the four dimensions the public record actually supports, gives each its sourced figure and date, and then states which of the size claims circulating about this project survive contact with a source and which do not.

The four dimensions are capital, capacity, land and employment. A fifth, physical building size, is the one most readers assume must be public and is not.

Capital: Rs 91,000 crore, and the exact number in the agreement

The Union Cabinet approved the plant on 29 February 2024 under the India Semiconductor Mission DURABLE. The headline investment is quoted almost everywhere as Rs 91,000 crore, and the Fiscal Support Agreement signed on 5 March 2025 cites Rs 91,526 crore DURABLE. The rounded figure is fine for prose. The precise one belongs in any document that will be checked.

The number is not entirely private money. Under the India Semiconductor Mission the central government supports 50 percent of eligible project cost, with the state layer stacked separately, which means the headline figure describes the size of the project rather than the size of one company's cheque DURABLE. How that support is structured and disbursed, and what the state layer adds on top of it, is set out on who funds the Dholera fab.

For scale within this record's own ledger, Rs 91,000 crore is the largest single, well-sourced industrial commitment anywhere in the Dholera project, and it is the reason the rest of the supplier and utility activity exists. Everything else tracked here is downstream of it. What the figure is not is a measure of how much has been spent to date, which is not published, and this record does not estimate it.

Capacity: up to 50,000 wafers a month, on 300mm

Design capacity is up to 50,000 wafer starts per month on 300mm wafers, across a stated node range of 28 to 110nm DURABLE. Three things in that sentence deserve unpacking, because each is routinely mangled.

First, "up to" means at full ramp. No fab starts at its design number. Capacity is installed in phases as tools are bought, and the gap between a plant's nameplate and its actual starts in year one is normally large. Anyone reading 50,000 as an opening-day figure is reading it wrong. No phasing schedule for this fab has been published, so the profile of installed capacity between first production and full ramp is not public, and this record does not model one. What can be said is that design capacity is the number a fab is engineered to reach, and reaching it is a commercial decision taken tool by tool as demand justifies the spend.

Second, wafer starts are not chips. A wafer carries many dies, and how many depends on die size, which depends on the product. A 300mm wafer has an area of about 70,700 square millimetres. As an illustration with an assumption made explicit, a 25 square millimetre die would give roughly 2,800 gross dies before edge exclusion and scribe lanes, so call it on the order of 2,600 candidate dies per wafer. At that illustrative die size, 50,000 wafers a month would carry something on the order of a hundred million candidate dies a month before yield is applied. The arithmetic is ours and the die size is invented for the illustration, so it is a demonstration of the shape of the number rather than a claim about this fab's output. The economics behind wafer size are set out on 300mm wafer economics.

Third, the silicon itself is a surprisingly small physical volume. Fifty thousand 300mm wafers a month is about 3,530 square metres of silicon surface, which is roughly a third of a hectare, or about 4.2 hectares a year. A plant costing Rs 91,000 crore exists to process an area of material each year that would fit inside a few large sheds. That ratio, enormous capital against a small physical output, is the defining economic feature of the industry and the reason yield rather than volume decides whether a fab makes money.

On the node question, this record's position is documented rather than resolved. The official range remains 28 to 110nm, Bloomberg reported on 17 July 2026 that the plant will open mostly at 90nm, and TrendForce carried the report on 20 July 2026 REPORTED. A wafer number therefore does not settle what the plant will sell, because the node mix decides the product mix.

What a number of this size buys inside a fab

No breakdown of the Dholera capital budget has been published, so what follows is the standard composition of fab capital expenditure as the industry generally reports it, offered as structure rather than as a claim about this project's internal numbers.

The dominant line is equipment. In a modern fab the process tools, lithography scanners, etchers, deposition systems, implanters, planarisation tools, cleans, metrology and inspection, together with the automated material handling that moves wafers between them, account for the large majority of the capital. The building and cleanroom are a minority share, and the utility plant beneath and beside the cleanroom, the ultrapure water system, bulk and specialty gas infrastructure, chemical distribution, exhaust abatement, chillers, air handling and electrical distribution, is a substantial share on its own. That is why fab costs scale with capacity and node rather than with floor area: adding wafer starts means adding tools, and tools are the budget.

Two consequences follow for anyone reading the headline figure. First, a large part of the money leaves the country, because the tool vendors are a global oligopoly and India has no domestic equivalent at this level. Second, the spending profile is back-loaded: civil works consume a modest fraction early, and the heavy capital lands when tools are ordered and installed. A plant that is about half built in civil terms has therefore not spent anything close to half of its budget, which is the arithmetic error underneath most of the completion-percentage commentary in circulation.

Land: 66.16 hectares, and what it is not

The Tata Semiconductor special economic zone at Dholera was notified around April 2026 covering 66.16 hectares, as reported by Business Standard and the Times of India DURABLE. In the units most Indian readers think in, that is about 163 acres, or roughly 0.66 square kilometres, a conversion rather than a separate source.

Put that against the surrounding geography and the proportions become clear. The Phase I activation area where trunk infrastructure landed first is about 22.5 square kilometres, so the notified zone is under 3 percent of it. The special investment region's planning envelope is about 920 square kilometres, so the zone is less than a tenth of one percent of the envelope. This is the correction that most size confusion needs: the fab is a large industrial facility inside a very large planning area, and the two numbers are constantly blended into an impression of a fab the size of a city.

A further distinction is worth holding, because it is the one that trips up readers who go looking for the plant on a map. A notified special economic zone is an administrative boundary carrying a customs and duty regime, not a drawing of a building. The zone area therefore includes everything the operator intends to sit inside that regime, and the fab structure itself occupies a fraction of it. What the zone status actually confers, and what it does not decide, is set out on what a semiconductor special economic zone is.

The wider allotment record gives the third layer. The NICDC Delivery Monitoring Unit report of 30 June 2026 records 14 plots allotted across about 545 acres, of which about 476 acres is industrial, with Tata Chemicals named as the anchor industrial allottee DURABLE. An industrial city's tenancy accumulates one allotment at a time, and this is what the early part of that curve looks like when it is read from the document rather than from a brochure.

Employment: two figures that do not reconcile

Two numbers circulate. Tata Electronics' 2024 communication on the project spoke of more than 20,000 direct and indirect jobs REPORTED. Press reporting on the special economic zone notification carried a figure of about 21,000 jobs attached to the notified zone REPORTED. Their proximity is treated as mutual confirmation. It is not.

The company figure bundles plant payroll with supplier, contractor and induced employment. The zone figure is an administrative projection attached to a land notification, describing expected employment inside the zone across its build-out. Neither carries a phased breakdown, an assumed multiplier or a published methodology, and no reconciliation of either against actual hiring has been identified. The single number that would settle the question, direct headcount at stated capacity, has not been published by the company or the ministry. The longer treatment, including what a fab payroll is actually made of, is on how many jobs the Tata fab will create.

Physical size: the dimension nobody has published

Readers reasonably expect a fab's size to be quoted in square feet of cleanroom, and for most large fabs internationally some version of that number eventually reaches the public. For Dholera it has not. This desk has not identified a published figure for cleanroom area, class rating by zone, building footprint, number of process tools, or installed electrical load specific to the fab. Those are the numbers an engineer would ask for first, and their absence is a finding rather than an oversight on this page.

Utility figures for the wider region exist in the delivery record and are not the same thing as fab-specific consumption, so this record keeps them apart rather than presenting regional trunk capacity as though it described the plant. When a company or government document publishes fab-level figures, they will be recorded here with their date and tier. Until then, the honest entry in this row is blank, and a blank that is labelled is more useful than a number that is guessed.

Which size claims survive sourcing

Two framings often attached to this project fail on the record and are worth naming. The first is the claim of civic primacy, the suggestion that this is the country's earliest smart city. No source this desk has examined establishes that, so the phrase does not appear here. The defensible descriptions are flagship greenfield industrial smart city, largest node of the industrial corridor programme, and the site of India's first major commercial fab.

The second is the habit of attaching national totals to this one project. As of 15 July 2026 the India Semiconductor Mission's published position records 12 approved semiconductor manufacturing projects with cumulative investment above Rs 1.6 lakh crore, spread across several states DURABLE. That is a national figure covering fabs, compound-semiconductor plants and nine packaging units, and quoting it as though it described Dholera inflates this project by a large multiple. The count with its date sits on how many semiconductor projects India has approved.

How to use these numbers

If you are sizing a supplier opportunity, capacity and node range are the operative figures, because they determine consumable volumes, gas and chemical loads and the tool population that will need service contracts. If you are sizing an employment or property question, the jobs figures are projections and should be quoted as such with their source attached. If you are writing about the project, the four sourced numbers above plus the explicit blanks are the whole defensible set, and our key numbers table keeps them dated.

The reason this page insists on the boundaries is that size claims are the easiest thing to inflate and the hardest thing for a reader to check. A fab is big in capital, precise in capacity, modest in land, unresolved in employment and unpublished in floor area. All five of those statements are true at once, and a description that gives you only the first one is selling something.