In a conference hall in New Delhi during SEMICON India 2026, an ASML executive delivered a statement that carried more weight than its size. “Our operations in India start now,” Lin Kiat Yap, the Dutch company’s executive vice president for customer support, told the Press Trust of India. The starting headcount, he said, is 20 to 30 people.
That is a small number for the world’s only maker of the extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines required to print the most advanced chips. It is a significant one for India, which has spent years trying to build a domestic semiconductor industry and now has the company that sits at the top of the chipmaking supply chain putting people on the ground.
The move is tied to a project in the state of Gujarat. ASML signed a strategic partnership in May with Tata Electronics, which is building a 300-millimeter wafer fab in Dholera with monthly capacity of 50,000 wafers. Tata’s plant would be India’s first 300-millimeter customer, and ASML’s machines are what make a fab of that scale run. Without them, no amount of government subsidy produces a working chip.
Yap said the initial team of 20 to 30 will grow only if India’s ambition, and Tata’s, proves real. The phrasing was careful, and for good reason. India has announced more fabs than it has finished, and equipment makers are reluctant to staff up in a market until the orders are concrete. ASML’s opening is an early bet that Dholera will be different.
The timing also reflects a broader strategic shift. Export controls have progressively narrowed ASML’s access to the Chinese market, once a large and growing source of revenue. Washington and The Hague have tightened rules on the sale of advanced lithography tools to Chinese fabs, closing off a customer base that ASML could not simply replace. India, by contrast, sits inside the Western orbit of semiconductor alliances, and its government has put billions of dollars behind chip manufacturing.
For ASML, India represents a hedge as much as a growth market. The company’s machines sell for hundreds of millions of dollars each and are booked years in advance by a handful of customers in Taiwan, South Korea, and the United States. India is unlikely to become a top customer soon. But it is a place where the industry’s next wave of capacity could be built, and ASML wants its engineers embedded before that wave arrives.
The engineering work matters as much as the sales. Fabs do not merely buy an ASML machine; they require a long tail of installation, calibration, and maintenance that only the company’s own staff can perform. Starting with two dozen engineers means ASML can support Tata’s ramp from the beginning, rather than flying specialists in from other regions. The customer-support role Yap oversees is precisely the part of the business that must live next door to a customer.
India’s chip ambitions have attracted other Western suppliers for the same reason. Applied Materials, Lam Research, and others have expanded their presence in the country as the government’s incentive program took shape. ASML’s arrival completes a picture in which the full tool set needed for a modern fab is now represented on Indian soil.
Skeptics note that a 20-to-30-person office is a long way from a manufacturing or training center, and that ASML has kept its most sensitive technology in the Netherlands and the United States rather than placing it in new markets. The company has not said it will move production or deep research to India. What it is doing is planting a flag early, in a market that could absorb a meaningful share of the next decade’s fab investment.
The bet, in other words, is on India’s follow-through. Yap tied the expansion explicitly to “India’s ambition and Tata’s ambition,” a formulation that leaves ASML room to grow quickly if Dholera stays on schedule and to stay small if it does not. Either way, the presence is now real, and the equipment maker that the world’s chipmakers cannot do without has decided India is worth a footprint.
ASML’s position is rooted in a near-monopoly. The company is the only supplier of extreme-ultraviolet lithography, the technology that prints the smallest transistors, and every leading-edge fab on earth depends on its tools. India, which launched a roughly $10 billion incentive program to seed domestic chipmaking, has courted exactly this kind of anchor supplier. Having ASML on the ground, even in a small office, makes the country’s pitch to the rest of the supply chain more credible, according to industry executives.
That footprint will be watched closely. If Tata’s fab comes online as scheduled, the two dozen engineers could become a much larger operation, and India would take a genuine step toward the self-sufficiency its officials have long promised. If not, the office will stand as evidence of how hard it is to turn ambition into a working wafer.
