iCET: The India-US Semiconductor Partnership

Imagine India's semiconductor ambitions, covered throughout this page, benefiting genuinely from a formal, government-level technology cooperation framework with the United States specifically, the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technologies, iCET, which includes a dedicated semiconductor cooperation track reinforced further in early 2026, reflecting how central chip technology has become to the broader strategic and economic relationship between the two countries.

This partnership manifests through concrete commercial collaboration rather than remaining purely diplomatic framework, Applied Materials, a major global semiconductor equipment manufacturer whose tools are used across foundries worldwide, maintains a dedicated Bengaluru hub specifically positioned within this iCET framework, while companies like NXP have partnered with Indian AI chip startups like Kinara.ai, illustrating how the government-level cooperation agreement translates into genuine, specific business partnerships rather than remaining aspirational policy language alone.

This partnership connects directly to India's need for semiconductor manufacturing equipment covered under the Dholera Fab discussion elsewhere on this site, building fabrication capacity requires access to genuinely sophisticated equipment from companies like Applied Materials and ASML, both covered elsewhere on this site as among the small handful of companies globally capable of producing this equipment, making the iCET relationship's equipment access dimension just as commercially consequential as any research or design collaboration it facilitates.

This bilateral framework matters directly for India's position within the broader global semiconductor geopolitics covered under the GPU export control discussion elsewhere on this site, formal technology cooperation with the United States specifically helps position India favourably for continued access to critical semiconductor technology and equipment, at a time when semiconductor supply chains have become genuinely central to broader great-power technology competition, making iCET's semiconductor track a meaningfully strategic, not merely commercial, component of India's overall chip industry development.