Ultra-pure process chemicals and gases

No fab runs without them, and India makes almost none.

Every semiconductor process step consumes ultra-pure chemicals and gases — hydrofluoric acid, sulphuric acid, high-purity nitrogen and argon, etching and deposition compounds. For decades India sourced these primarily from Japan and the United States. As of 2026, India is projected to still import 85-90% of specialty chemicals and electronic-grade gases, with only about 10% produced domestically by 2030.

The difficulty is in the purity, not the chemistry. Semiconductor-grade materials must meet standards measured in parts per billion, sometimes parts per trillion, of metal content and moisture. A contaminant present at one part in a trillion is enough to ruin a wafer. Meeting that consistently demands specialised distillation and filtration, cleanroom handling, glass-lined equipment, and metrology capable of verifying purity at those levels. Only a handful of nations — Japan, the United States, South Korea, Germany, Taiwan — supply this reliably at scale.

Domestic production is emerging. In January 2025, INOX Air Products commissioned India's first ultra-high-purity electronic-grade nitrous oxide plant at Manali, Chennai, at 1,700 tonnes per year and 6N (99.9999%) purity. Tata Chemicals has signed an MOU with Merck to supply electronic materials for Tata Electronics' Dholera fab. Deepak Nitrite is expanding into etching and cleaning chemicals and has committed Rs 40 billion to new products and brownfield expansion. Linde India plans a high-purity gas plant at Dholera. The Semiconductor Laboratory at Mohali is being modernised with a $1-2 billion government investment.

These are early footholds against a large market. The Indian electronic chemicals market is expected to reach $7-9 billion by 2030; the global high-purity electronic chemicals market was worth roughly $70.8 billion in 2025.

The gap persists because the niche is narrow and deep. Global specialists like BASF and Solvay operate in India, but serve the broader chemical market rather than the semiconductor niche. Photoresists, ultrapure water, high-purity hydrogen peroxide and etching chemicals remain minimal to non-existent in domestic production. The dependence extends to gases sourced from Qatar, Algeria, Australia, China and the US — and the fragility is real: neon, which powers photolithography lasers and accounts for 90% of global demand, saw shortages after the Russia-Ukraine conflict disrupted the roughly 50% of global output Ukraine had supplied.

Closing it is a matter of time and sustained investment. Even as fabs and packaging units take shape, India will keep importing most gases and specialty chemicals; building reliable domestic suppliers, metrology standards and clean handling infrastructure will take years of continuous effort.